


Tron: Redemption

by Shadow_Chaser



Series: Adagio for Tron [4]
Category: Tron (Movies), Tron - All Media Types, Tron: Betrayal, Tron: Evolution, Tron: Legacy (2010), Tron: Uprising
Genre: Alan is Flynn's cleanup crew, Alan is a rather poor parent, BAMF!Alan Bradley, BAMF!Tron, Flynn Lives!, Gen, Of all the ways Alan meets Tron he wants to strangle Clu, Post-Tron: Adagio, Slightly Angsty!Tron, Some of the relationship tags are mildly spoilery, Somewhat Tron: Evolution compliant, Tron: Uprising compliant, Very Tron & Alan-centric
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2019-10-14 06:09:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 50,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17503100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadow_Chaser/pseuds/Shadow_Chaser
Summary: As Rinzler, he derezzed many programs on The Grid by Clu’s orders.  As Tron, he had tried to protect many programs on The Grid per his directive and through Flynn's wishes. This is the story of his redemption amiss the chaos of The Grid in the aftermath of Clu and Kevin Flynn’s death.





	1. Overture

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Legume_Shadow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Legume_Shadow/gifts).



> It's been...a while since I wrote in the "Tron" fandom. When writing "Adagio" I didn't set out to write any post-Legacy story until I was sure and ready of a good plot. Now, I think it may be that time to post it.
> 
> This story covers the entire comic "Tron: Betrayal" flashbacks from "Tron: Legacy," and my own story "Tron: Adagio." "Evolution" and "Uprising" characters will be referenced and featured. This is not a Sam and Quorra-centric story. This is a heavily Tron-centric story with healthy doses of Alan Bradley. All characters are not mine, they belong to Disney.

Lora Baines-Bradley was the first to discover the possibility, the Anomaly as she coined it.

The idea that Kevin Flynn may still be alive after reintegration with Clu.

The idea was considered after examining Quorra's triple helix DNA strand. Being one of the few who knew Quorra's secret along with months of research into what Kevin's disc merged with the Iso's unique traits did to her, Lora finally posited the question during a Thanksgiving dinner of the Bradleys and the Flynns.

Lora's presence was not out of the ordinary. After Sam took over ENCOM, she became a part-time remote consultant, flying back and forth between Washington D.C. and Los Angeles. Sam immediately hired her to also be Quorra's personal technical physician, the only one who knew how the Digitizer worked after Walter Gibbs' passing in the early 2000s.

After the Thanksgiving dinner bomb as her son Jet took to calling it since that revelation, it took more months to convince the others that there was a chance Flynn was alive. Once Sam, Quorra, Alan and Roy were convinced, arrangements were made to enter the Grid once more. The partition was holding, stabilized within ENCOM's servers. Contingency plans were drawn up; there would be no closing of the portal until each an every single User who went through was back on the other side, success or no success. The Grid was moved to a separate server on ENCOM's vast network, still offline, but with more safety measures built in than Flynn to prevent another closing and trapping of the portal. An emergency beacon was coded to ensure should anything catastrophic occur, all Users on The Grid would head straight to the portal.

All that was left was to enter Kevin Flynn's Grid.

 


	2. The Grid

The first thing that registered in Alan Bradley's awareness was that it was rather dark in the Grid. Only far distant twinkling lights and what might have passed as digitized moonlight illuminated the area. Long shadows cast and thrown up against jagged shards of rock, cliffs, and obelisks of shale-like digital code made for an eerie sight. The sudden zapping sound behind him made him turn to see both Sam and Quorra arrive, both dressed in form-fitting armor with bright wide lines glowing a bright blue-white. They were similar in cut and style, though Quorra's had an addition of a skort.

He glanced down at himself, suddenly and acutely aware of something soft and supple covered his own body. To his surprise, he was wearing an overcoat of sorts, but there was no bright wide lines. It was all black and with bits of white dots here and there. However, as he pulled back the overcoat, he saw his armor with the same minimalist design. It was rather odd, but Alan found a modicum of comfort in it. He reached up to push his glasses when he accidentally bumped his fingers against the bridge of his nose.

Alan frowned.

He reached up and patted his face, shocked to find that he was not wearing his glasses. “Sam-” he called out a little alarmed.

“Hang on,” Sam threw something up into the air. The sudden burst of light illuminated the dim area, making the shadows even more jagged. The light winked on and off before staying on. Sam looked at him before a crooked smile appeared on his face. “Look at you, Uncle Alan, getting rid of the glasses.”

“Uh-”

“It looks like the Grid corrected any imperfections once you landed in it,” Lora's voice sounded tinned and seemingly buzzed under Alan's teeth.

He sucked in a quick breath, grimacing at the feeling. Even Sam looked rather uncomfortable, twisting his head left and right. Only Quorra seemed unaffected and the ISO stared at them puzzled.

“I thought wireless phones were used in such a way from what you showed me, Sam?”

“Yeah,” Sam reached up and stuck a pinkie into his ear before shaking his head. “But not like this. It's like almost buzzing in my head.”

“It was how we all communicated within our own wireless interface if we wished for a more private mode of exchanging information. I remember when there would be gridbug attacks, emergency protocols were overridden and wireless interfacing was enabled to allow for fast forms of communication. We could never penetrate it, but we ended up developing our own.”

“Well, now we know what the code does when we planted it on the thumb drives you all carried when you went in.” Lora's voice was sympathetic and Alan resisted the urge to twitch and stick his own finger into his ear. He would have to get used to it.

“Looks like the thumb drive did upload into your discs,” Jet's voice was a rumbling baritone, which sounded a lot more comfortable than Lora's own alto. “That's where I'm guessing the various contents of the thumb drives were dumped to.”

“Yeah, was able to pull a Light Bit immediately off of it,” Sam gestured towards the digital mote that now circled lazily around their heads. It winked, turning diamond shape and occasionally hexagonal before resuming its mote-like form.

“Your vitals look good,” Jet continued, “though I'm willing to bet once you leave the Grid, you'll need your glasses again Dad.”

“Great,” Alan groused as he absently reached behind him and pulled his disc. He activated it, its buzzing whine setting his teeth on edge. Deactivating the function, he instead, clicked a small button on the inner portion of the disc and an avatar of his features popped up, rotating around. He reached in with a free hand, instinct guiding him as it opened up a virtual holographic menu. He could almost see where the thumb drive of small programs and bits of code and information he had put onto it were located.

“Wow,” Sam's voice was closer and Alan briefly looked up to see the younger man looking at the projection his disc was showing. “You've got a lot of stuff.”

“Maybe a bit more than I brought with me, this is definitely odd.” Alan did not recognize some of the applications, items, and extraneous coding he was flipping through.

“We should get to somewhere safer,” Quorra spoke up and the two of them glanced up to see her looking around worriedly, baton held in one hand, but not activated. “The Sea of Simulation is really unpredictable, always been, and I'm not sure what we'll encounter.”

“We can't read the code that well up here,” Lora's voice returned. “It's giving us some errors. Jet's trying to debug it.”

Alan nodded as he deactivated his disc and holstered it behind him. He glanced at Sam who returned his nod. “Let's get going.”

“So Dad's hovel is on the other side of the city. I think we can fly there, but we should probably stay low and then get to the edges of the city. Once we're there, we can probably switch to a off-grid runner and drive the rest of the way.” Sam moved away and stared out towards the direction of the distant twinkling lights.

“Why not drive?” Alan asked.

“Nothing really can stabilize on the Sea. Flight or a direct path like the solar sailer or the carrier are the only things that can survive,” Quorra replied, gesturing towards the vast emptiness. “Think of it like a non-partitioned side of a hard-drive. Where you want to build things, but you have to ensure the coding is secure before you can. However, if you want to go over it to an already partitioned area, you'll have to either build a bridge or find one to cross it.”

“Oh,” Alan nodded. It made sense and he was a little embarrassed that he did not think of the reasoning behind it. This was still a computer world built in the 1980s and he should have known. He turned away, staring up at the Bit which winked a hexagon and floated down to him.

“Bit! Get over here,” Sam called out, annoyed and the Bit zoomed towards him.

Alan glanced over and saw Sam removing a cuboid shape from a pack that was transported with him and Quorra before activating it. He and Quorra stepped back as the cuboid grew larger and larger-

“Nonononono!” the Bit suddenly called out and zoomed away from them. It flashed jagged icosohedrons of red.

Alan's eyes widened in surprise as he realized what the Bit saw that they did not. The digital mote illuminated the clear delineation of the edge of the platform and the flyer file that was being decompressed. The platform was too small to safely hold the three of them and the flyer.

“Shit,” Sam swore.

“Is there a way to stop it?” Quorra asked.

“It's an automated decompressing program. I can't stop it without losing the whole file! Jet! Anything you can-”

“Can't man, can't,” Jet's voice sounded frustrated, “I told you-”

“Stop it,” Lora's voice cut in. “Jet, see if you can override admin access. Sam, can you access the internal files of the platform you're standing on?”

Alan took a step back as the cube grew larger and larger, slowly unfurling large wings. He looked around, trying to see if there was a way he could help. Out of the corner of his eyes, he could see Quorra taking several steps back, unsure while Sam was trying to frantically tap on a wall near the open I/O port. He suddenly spotted something near where Quorra was standing and hurried over to her.

“Alan-One, what-”

Alan knelt down and tapped the small source of light he spotted. Immediately a command panel opened, awash in code and Alan quickly read through it. He knelt down and started to type, a hard-light keyboard activating underneath his fingers. He did not know what he was doing, but instead, let his years and years of programming instincts guide him. The keyboard disappeared as a touchboard console lit up in front of him and Alan reached out with his fingertips, touching where the circular motes were. He made contact, a sing-song tone in his ears telling him that he was successful. Alan slowly spread his fingers out and a deep rumbling came from within.

“Hey what-”

“Sam! Look!”

Alan ignored Quorra and Sam's outbursts as he saw beyond the panel the platform growing in a wide arc, filling the space that that still-decompressing flyer file was growing into. Beyond them, the Bit flashed a yellow octohedron of joyful 'yesyesyesyesyes.' He watched, fascinated at the sight of the platform growing byte by byte. It was only after Bit stopped flashing and resumed its neutral look of a blue-white icosohedron that Alan stopped widening his fingers. He let loose a breath he did not know he was holding and lifted his hand from the hard-light panel. It disappeared, leaving them with Bit as the only light source as it zipped around them. The digital mote flashed a bright yellow 'yes' as it flew by his head before hovering above them.

“...Alan...”

Alan looked towards Sam to see him staring at him with something akin to surprise gracing his features. He turned to see Quorra with an expression that made him feel distinctly uncomfortable. She looked like she had seen the face of rapture and was staring at him with wide eyes.

“You're a Creator,” she breathed in quietly.

Alan cleared his throat and looked away, embarrassed.

“Hey Dad,” Jet's voice crackled behind his teeth, “don't know what you did, but you just reformatted a very small part of the drive itself. Hell, I'm looking through the coding-”

“Jet, that's enough,” Alan cleared his throat again, his voice rough as he stood up.

The three of them stood in awkward silence before Sam ambled over, gently placing a hand on Quorra's shoulder, snapping her out of her funk. “I guess this answers a question you and I probably had for a while.”

“...Yeah,” Alan looked away, staring at the completely decompressed light flyer sitting rather innocently on a circular platform, ready for take off.

“Am I not computing correct- er, did I miss something?” Quorra's voice was still a little breathy in awe, but it seemed she managed to get herself under control.

“Two days before disappeared into the Grid, Flynn said he wanted to share something with me.” Alan truncated the explanation as they walked down the newly made steps and approached the light flyer. It flickered a gentle blue-white as it sensed their approach and the platform rotated and cockpit opened up to let them in. He did not like the fact that he now had some proof of Kevin's intent for him to build The Grid with him. It unnerved him and rubbed him in a way that felt wrong.

There was a small popping sound that echoed in one of Alan's molars before Jet's voice came back, this time a lot more focused and less reverberating. He realized his son had patched a private line to him. “Dad...do you think Mom might have the same privileges?”

“Probably,” Alan murmured, but shook his head at Quorra's sudden glance at him. He ducked his head as he climbed into the flyer and made to look like he was looking for his harness. “Your Uncle Kevin wanted your Mom and I to share everything after we took over ENCOM.”

“Mom left the room by the way...she looked like she was going to be sick,” Jet sounded worried.

“She'll be all right, your Mom's strong.” Alan knew it was empty words, but hoped it at least reassured their son. Lora was always vague about her reasoning in taking her job in Washington D.C., but Alan now wondered if his wife knew something about The Grid that he did not.

He grimaced as his molar buzzed against his tongue, Jet turning the comm lines back to a more public setting. At the same time, he buckled his harness as Quorra started to flip the switches to activate the flyer to his left. Sam sat in the back of them, ready to man the rear guns. The whine of the flyer started up and the cockpit started to close in on them. At the very last second the Bit that illuminated the area flew in and Alan reached up to grab it just as it zoomed by his head.

“Nice reflexes, Alan,” Sam said.

“Disc golf and ultimate frisbee,” Alan replied as he lowered his hand and opened it. He expected the Bit to fly all around the cockpit, but the digital mote was instead, contentedly hovering placidly in his hand.

“Dad, you haven't played in ages,” Jet's tone was one of resigned annoyance. “I bet I can beat you this weekend – a round at the Pasadena course!”

“Oh really,” Alan raised an eyebrow at the challenge, even though his son could not see it. “All right, let's see what you've got kid.”

“No, no, no, both of you got this all wrong. Quorra here's gonna kick all of your asses,” Sam interjected.

Alan glanced over to see Quorra with a wide smile on her face. She merely nodded, concentrating on lifting them up into the air. He glanced back to see Sam with the same cheeky, confident smile on his face, reminiscent of Kevin's own. “And what will you be doing?”

“Sneaking in and stealing all of the points, maybe flipping a few discs out of the bins here and there and making sure that none except for Quorra wins,” Sam replied. “I know I'm shit at disc golf.”

The warm chuckle of laughter by all three echoed throughout the cockpit, lessening the tension that had grown since they arrived on the Grid. Quorra gunned the engine and the flyer took off smoothly, leaving the I/O port behind them as it skimmed across the surface of the Sea of Simulation.

The brief moment of respite died as Alan took in the surroundings, noting the pixelated bytes of waves, datashards, voxels, some bobbing up and down. Jagged pieces of red-lit debris dotted the blackened sea. Remnants of Clu's carrier and the rectified army that were carried in it. He could see a few discs on the surface, some bisected, other still glowing bright red, white, even green and blue. There was no sign of a distinctly yellow disc – Clu's disc.

“The reintegration of Clu and your father must have derezzed everyone on the carrier,” Quorra sounded decidedly neutral. Alan glanced to see her with a flat expression on her face.

“Do you know if they could have been saved?” Sam asked.

“I honestly don't know,” she replied, “your father gave him systems administrator privileges. During the Purge and the days after the rebellion when Clu was stamping out resistance everywhere, it didn't seem like people could turn back.”

“If Clu had systems administrator access, he could have overridden their code, leaving them a shell of themselves,” Alan replied, thinking out loud. “But to do it on a massive basis would have used a lot of processing power, advances in the coding of simple programs to override certain failsafes. Even for a program like Clu, given the fact that Kevin created him in the 1980s, the advances in today's technology would have no comparison. In fact, it probably be similar to yourself, Quorra, an ISO-based coding.”

“Back before the rebellion, even during it, there were whispers by the ISOs that Clu had a secret trophy room. A room where he kept the discs of his foes. They think it was most of the ISO leadership when they fell, since none of them were re-purposed and because Clu couldn't access our code.”

“Quorra?”

She kept her gaze straight ahead as he adjusted the stick a little. “He might have stolen such a process from one of the codes.”

“How? From one of the ISO leader's discs?”

Quorra's grip on the sticks of the light flyer tightened. “You have to understand, SamFlynn, Alan-One, no one, not even Kevin Flynn, was able to read our code. Ophelia, the first of us, our greatest leader, said we were shielded, protected from Clu and his plans for us. Giles, Ophelia's right hand told us we could not be touched, that if we died, Clu would never be able to touch us.”

“And somehow, you think he was able to get coding off of their discs.”

“Ophelia was the only one who was able to process that many voices, guide all of us in one direction. She was our leader, she was our guide,” Quorra replied, her voice quiet. “When she perished...we ran. We scattered, we knew the Purge could not be stopped, that the war was lost.”

“Quorra,” Sam leaned forward and placed a hand on her shoulder, squeezing it gently. “I'm sorry.”

“I know,” Quorra's eyes were shining with unshed tears as she briefly reached back to squeeze his hand in return. She glanced over to Alan. “Is it okay if we pick up a few discs from the Sea? I would like to know...and...maybe give something of a burial to Ophelia if possible...”

“Extract her code from the discs?” Alan asked and she nodded. “All right,” he could see that it had been hard for her to tell them what happened. Even Sam said Quorra never really spoke of the time before she met the Creator. Alan realized that with her coming back to The Grid, it was rather brave of her to be their guide. So many memories, cycles upon cycles, and it told Alan that Quorra, for all of her long years on The Grid, she was still so very young, still so very naive.

“Hang on, let me modify a few skids so we can land this thing in the water,” Sam leaned back into his chair and brought up a hardlight interface above his head. He quickly tapped out a few lines, his fingers dancing across the screen before a couple of thumping sounds was heard.

Alan watched, fascinated, as the console around Quorra briefly rearranged themselves before a new lever appeared and she wrenched it downward. Immediately she pushed the sticks in a downward motion and the light flyer started to dip towards the Sea. It was a gentle splash, two bumps before she quickly killed the engine. She hit a couple more switches above her head and the cockpit opened.

He did not know what to expect, but the lack of any type of odor or air disoriented Alan for a moment as he fumbled with his harness. He managed to extricate himself and climbed out after Sam, taking care to keep one hand on the lip of the cockpit as he knelt down to where several discs were bobbing up and down on the waves.

The Bit that sat contentedly on his outstreched palm during the flight suddenly hovered around them, brightening the inky darkness, casting an eerie glow against the murky Sea. Its digital mote reflected off of the discs, most of them orange-red. There were one or two that were blue and green, but they were few and far between the numerous orange-red ones.

“Alan,” Sam thrust the end of a glowing baton that held a fishing net in front of him and he took it.

“When did you-”

“I carried an extra baton when I left The Grid,” Sam replied, “figured I didn't have the need for two lightcycles or swords, so I modified one of them to be like a weird Swiss army knife of random things before we came back in here.”

“Handy,” he replied as he cast the net out with his limited reach and scooped up a handful of orange-red discs. He handed the edge of the baton over to Sam who took it and immediately dumped the discs into the back of the flyer. The metallic clanging sound was rather loud in the harsh silence of the Sea.

“Quorra?” Sam called out.

“That should be enough for now,” the female ISO replied, “we should not linger on the Sea anyways.”

“Got it,” Sam shortened his baton until it was normal and stuck it to the side of his armor as he helped Alan back into the cockpit.

Alan all but fell into the seat, feeling old unused muscles that he did not know he had pull from the brief excursion of fetching discs. The Bit flew back in with him, zooming around their heads once before settling to hover above Alan's lap. He glanced down at it, wondering why the digital mote was suddenly attached to him when it was clearly built by Sam. However, he pushed that thought out of his head as he buckled his harness back into place as Quorra closed the cockpit and started the engines once more. They lifted up into the air and continued on their flight.

“Five discs,” Sam declared and Alan glanced back to see him trying to pile all of the discs onto his lap, but due to their uneven cut, it was rather lopsided looking.

“Here, I'll take a few to look at,” he offered.

“Thanks,” Sam handed him two of the discs.

Alan took them and stashed one near his feet before activating the one he had in his hand. It flickered to life, showing the masked face of what looked like a guard unit. “What are we looking for?”

“ISOs have triple-helix DNA. Check through the files, the coding to see if there is a bit of a triple-helix stashed somewhere in the lines. Lora was able to isolate the digital equivalent in Quorra's DNA.”

“Got it,” Alan tapped deeper into the disc, bringing up lines and lines of code. He looked at it, noting the crude way that the poor owner had been rectified. There were basic strings, simple ones that seemed truncated against more advance ones. However, it looked like someone had spliced the coding together and put together a messy patchwork of lines and commands that did not make sense.

“Geez,” Alan breathed as he flipped through the code, “I'm surprise this...aquifer processing unit was still able to function.”

“What's that?” Sam sounded distracted.

“Clu's handiwork is a mess,” he shook his head, “I mean, look at this. He's got the basic command to process the aquifers and enable the program to report and function, but then he's spliced on his own combat upgrades and they're not even good ones. It's like he basically gave a gun to an untrained civilian and told the person that they were now going to make headshots. There's no precision. It looks like a really bad version of one of Kevin's old programs back in his gaming days. Errors tied together that somehow manage to work.” He flicked his fingers, digging deeper into the lines of code. “It's a miracle that this program didn't fall apart when reactivated.”

“Ah,” Sam suddenly called out and Alan twisted in his chair. He saw the disc that was in Sam's hands glowing an eerie red. However, one of Sam's fingers was pinched around a line of code and was slowly and carefully dragging it out.

“Found it?”

“Yeah, check the lines on maintenance. It's a remnant of a repurposing code that Clu built that was inserted into the programs to make sure his hack job was stable,” Sam replied as he pinched the moth of glowing gold code between his finger tips. His other hand reached into his pocket and withdrew a small microdisc that he brought with him. Pressing the two together, Alan watched as the microdisc lit up gold before resuming its black slate color.

“I knew it,” Quorra growled, but there was some relief contained in it.

“Quorra...” Alan glanced over to the ISO to see her hastily wipe at her eyes.

“Hey, it's all right you know. Once we figure out this whole thing with Dad, we can come back to the Sea and collect more discs. That way, you can properly bury and mourn Ophelia, all right?”

“Yeah, I know,” Quorra wiped at her face again, but kept her gaze forward, “thanks, SamFlynn, Alan-One. You don't know how much this means to me. I finally get an answer to a question that my people have had for so long.”

Alan reached out and clapped her gently on her shoulder. “It's not a pretty answer, but it's an answer.”

“Speaking of answers...” Sam spoke up, and Alan turned back to see that the younger Flynn's eyebrows were furrowed. He glanced down at the new disc that was sitting in his lap. The image that popped up was a bullet-shaped helmet.

“Sam?”

“Alan,” Sam looked up, before handing him the disc, “I think this is one of Rinzler's discs...”

 


	3. The Son of Alan-One

The last half hour of flight was silent save for the hum of the engines. Alan slowly turned the inactive disc in his hands. He stared at nothing in particular, but his eyes traced the lines of the disc over and over again. It once belonged to Tron, or rather Rinzler. He received a rather truncated version of the story from Sam and Quorra after the idea of Kevin Flynn potentially being alive in the Grid was put forth. It was the first time he learned the extent of what supposedly happened to his security program. He remembered allowing Flynn to take his program and use it. Quorra managed to extract some of the footage from whatever data was brought out from Flynn's disc to show him brief recordings of his program interacting with Flynn. They were few and far between, most of the time of Tron nagging Flynn regarding Clu or the ISOs.

Certain things that happened since that fateful day in 1982 made more sense now. Why Flynn requested he record a message to his security program offering encouragement. Why Flynn slipped and called him Tron in the times he nagged him regarding company matters. It also explained why Flynn would always crack jokes about his form and his ability to throw a frisbee on the disc golf and ultimate circuits. It was clear from Sam and Quorra's words that Tron became a friend to Flynn, tried to mediate the growing tension and keep the peace between ISOs and programs, but ultimately failed when Clu launched his rebellion.

He slowly let his fingers cross over each other as he flipped the disc. He had not delved into the code yet; too shocked to consider opening his program's disc and seeing what kind of mess Clu made when he repurposed Tron into Rinzler. Though, according to Sam, Rinzler had two discs. This was only one of the two. The other must have been floating somewhere in the Sea of Simulation or sunk to its unfathomable depths by now.

“We're approaching the edges of where the Outlands meet the Sea,” Quorra suddenly announced and dipped the light flyer lower. A sudden pinging sound echoed through the cockpit, bringing Alan out of his thoughts as he glanced at the HUD to see the flyer's external cameras zoom in on a faint blurry image.

“Something's on the shore. Looks like a program. No idea why would one be all the way out here.” Quorra sounded puzzled as she brought the flyer closer.

“Anything on your end Jet? Lora?” Sam asked before reaching over and tapping Quorra on the shoulder. “Don't get too close. Could be a gridbug.”

“Nothing,” Lora's voice buzzed against Alan's teeth.

“No, definitely a program. Unconscious though. Looks like it washed up from the Sea of Simulation,” Jet replied.

“Someone can survive that?” Alan was surprised.

“Seems logical if you think about it. Like any body of water, except who knows what's in it. Digital equivalent of sharks or predators?” Sam shrugged as Quorra set them down gently before opening the cockpit.

Alan unbuckled his harness as Bit flew out and illuminated the area, flashing a 'yes' before resuming its normal form. Alan glanced at the disc in his hand and decided to take it with him as he climbed down from the flyer. Sam was already moving, putting the four discs they picked up from the Sea into a shoulder pack while Quorra was finishing the post-flight checks. The plan was to recompress the flyer and Sam would work on the code to turn it into a light runner. It was the most efficient and least wasteful mode of transportation. Sam's original suggestion that they all just ride lightcycles earned him a glare of idiocy from Alan.

He stepped away to let Quorra finish up and watched as Sam jogged along the beach towards the unconscious program they detected with the flyer's sensors. Bit zoomed around as Quorra stepped out and pressed a button on the side of the flyer to start the compression.

“Uh...hey guys,” Sam called out and the two of them turned to see Sam standing over the body, disc held at his side but inactive. “You might want to come here...”

Alan glanced at the floating Bit who seemingly flew down to his eye level. He felt a bit ridiculous at what he was going to say, but there was no better way than to say it. “Bit, stay here and keep an eye on the compression.”

The digital mote flashed a 'yes' before flying back up and seemingly hovered above the flyer. Alan felt odd at having given a command to a digital creature. He pushed the feeling aside as he followed Quorra over. As they approached, Alan could feel the sudden weight of the inactive disc he held in his hand. Because before him, lying on the digital ones and zeros that made up the sandy ground was a younger version of him.

Lying on the ground was Tron.

* * *

_The first awareness Tron had was the sound of gentle waves, crashing into one another, a random pattern, yet not at all violent. The second was his passive sensors slowly coming online. They pinged back with the error messages that defined the Sea of Simulation and Tron allowed himself an inward smile. The Sea was starting to heal. During the time of the poison, the Sea never came back with error messages and in his memories as Rinzler; he remembered being completely puzzled about it, unable to comprehend why._

_He listened to the Sea’s random sounds through his audio filters, before his passive scanners picked up three anomalies, all of them quite close. They were not threatening, yet seemed oddly familiar…Users..._

_But what were Users doing here, unless-_

_Tron forced his eyes open and looked up into the face of SamFlynn who had a hesitant grin on his face. He almost sat up from where he was lying on one of the shallow rocks by the Sea before he realized that the User looked a little older than the last time he had seen him as Rinzler._

“ _Hey, easy_ _there.”_ _An extra pair of hands helped him up and he looked to his right to see that it was the isomorphic algorithm Quorra, surprisingly slightly older looking, kneeling down next to him as he shook his head trying to get his bearings. His scanners had indicated that she as a User, not an ISO. That was odd._

“ _Tron?” SamFlynn asked hesitantly and he rubbed his forehead before looking up at the younger Flynn._

“ _You, all of you escaped?” He asked._

“ _Yeah, we did,” the User looked relieved and Tron realized that the two of them feared that he was still Rinzler, still Clu’s lackey. “Well,” SamFlynn looked wistful for a nano, “except for Dad. He…sacrificed himself to stop Clu.”_

_It took a moment for Tron to realize what SamFlynn was talking about shook his head grimly. “I’m sorry.”_

“ _Hey, don’t apologize for it. We know you did your best,” SamFlynn clapped him on his shoulder and Tron was surprised at how like his father the younger User was. “Saw some of the old footage Dad had on his disc of his conversations with you.”_

_Tron rubbed his forehead again before someone tapped him on his left shoulder and a small vial of pure energy was handed to him. “Thanks,” he took the proffered vial and downed it, feeling his processes and command lines smooth out._

“ _Don’t mention it,” the voice sounded exactly like his and he froze, blinking in shock before turning to look up towards his left._

“ _Alan-One,” Tron breathed out, stunned to see his User, standing near him, a lot older than the message had shown him to be, but with a still ever youthful confidence to him. He was dressed, not in armor, but rather a similar style as Flynn had whenever he had entered The Grid._

“ _It’s finally good to meet you, Tron.” His User stuck out his hand and Tron absently took it, still reeling from the shock of seeing his own User and Creator here. “Alan Bradley.”_

_Tron was utterly speechless, his command lines nearly short circuiting before SamFlynn cleared his throat and he turned to face the younger Flynn._

“ _We were hoping that you could help us. Just only arrived from the real world, you see, but I believe that Dad may be still alive,” SamFlynn shrugged, “I figured since you know The Grid the best, you could give us that edge we need to find Kevin Flynn.”_

_Tron nodded as he got to his feet, still a bit dizzy from the low energy reserves, but otherwise good. “Flynn is a good friend of mine. If there is any chance that he may be still alive, then I would help you in any way I can.”_

“ _Good, because The Grid’s in chaos and we’ll need all the help we can get,” SamFlynn held out his hand, “welcome to the team, Tron.”_

_Tron took it and shook it firmly. “I never left.”_

* * *

There was a wariness exuded from the former ISO, Quorra. Tron did not need to scan her to realize this, nor did he blame her as he sat on the sandy ground. He watched her work with SamFlynn on the lines of code that was supposed to uncompress into a light runner. It seemed there was a glitch of sorts as the younger Flynn seemed frustrated by a modification he made when the cuboid was a light flyer. Though his memories were slowly being defragmented after so long as Rinzler, he knew he was Tron long enough to see the ISOs turn against him, turn in fear of all programs. The process- no, the memory of Ophelia indicated as much.

Tron absently reached behind him for his main disc and remembered he did not have it. He turned towards his left where his Creator sat against a long thin shale of rock, holding his main disc. The contents were active on the disc, but no recording was shown. Instead, lines and lines of his own code illuminated the display. There should have been a sense of wariness if any other program or User activated the contents in such an intimate way, but instead Tron only felt relief. His code was in good hands, was in his Creator's hands.

However, it seemed like Alan-One was not adjusting the code and instead, kept his eyes focused on the lines, studying it. His right hand flicked through the scrolling lines while his left was tapping an unknown rhythm against his leg. Another inactive disc sat on the ground next to his Creator. Tron wondered if it was Flynn's disc, and wanted to voice his query, but kept quiet. SamFlynn indicated as much that there was a chance, a probability that Flynn was alive. If it was truly the Creator's disc next to Alan-One, then it stood that the disc was in capable and good hands.

He extended his passive sensors out as best as he could, still feeling his processes sluggishly respond to his commands. A quick flare of light out of the corner of his light made him glance over to see that his command lines on the disc were responding to his attempts. However, it seemed to also provoke a reaction from Alan-One as the frown on his face grew deeper. However, his Creator did not say a word except reaching a hand out and rapidly scrolled through several command lines.

“Yesyesyesyesyes,” the light source that hovered over SamFlynn and Quorra suddenly flew towards them, its cheery response flashing like a beacon. Tron raised an eyebrow in mild surprise – it was a Bit. Bits were rather rare in The Grid, something Flynn tried importing from the old ENCOM system, but seemingly failed. Those that made their way in rarely survived, having not the digital processes to handle the The Grid itself.

It flashed a 'yes' over his head before flying towards Alan-One and flashing twice 'yesyes.' Tron watched, curious as the Bit continued to hover over Alan-One instead of flying back. At the same time, the sound of a deep reverberation of an engine coming online made him turn to see the light runner activate, its bright lines of blue illuminating the area.

“Hey Alan!” SamFlynn called out, waving his hand.

Tron could see Quorra loading up the back of the light runner while SamFlynn was gesturing for them to come over. They were ready to leave. He pushed himself off from the ground, feeling a lot better and more energized with the brief surge of unrefined energy running through his system. He glanced over to see his Creator still sitting on the ground. The digital mote hovered placidly overhead, oblivious to any and all calls.

“Alan-One?” Tron ventured quietly, stopping near his Creator.

“Hmm?” Was the mild and distracted sounding answer.

“Alan! Hey Uncle Alan!” SamFlynn called out again. Tron's passive scanners pinged back with the knowledge that the User was jogging towards them. His scanners seemed to respond normally now, the initial sluggishness gone. Tron supposed that it was part of his whole code rebooting and purging itself of the viral corruption that Clu rectified into him.

The younger-looking User skidded to a stop in front of them. “Alan-”

“What?” Was the highly annoyed response from his Creator.

One of Tron's eyebrows rose up in mild surprise. He never heard his Creator with such a tone. Judging by the incredulous look on SamFlynn's face, it seemed that neither did he.

“Uh...just saying that we're ready to go, man,” Flynn's son glanced at him and Tron shrugged.

He did not know what went on in his Creator's mind. To him, Alan-One was still a mystery, someone he could not believe was real even having sat near him for the last hour or so waiting for the light runner to be uncompressed. The small file that held Alan-One's words of encouragement so long ago pressed against him, a reminder of all of the good he did as Tron, but also all of the evil he did as Rinzler. Granted, Alan-One was a lot older than when he last saw his recording and he was not wearing those funny-looking optical elements perched on his nose, there was still something awe inspiring that his own Creator, his maker, shared the same digital space as he did.

And right now seemed highly annoyed.

“Uh huh,” gone was the annoyance, replaced by his distracted agreement.

“Is he always like this when he codes?” SamFlynn asked and for a second Tron thought the User was asking him, before the User nodded.

Tron tentatively scanned SamFlynn, his sensors pinging back with the usual errors that he knew was from Users, but he was able to pick up the sense that there was a layer of coding that was not SamFlynn's own. It was faint, but broadcast a wireless signal that resonated with the far distant light of the I/O port beacon. Perhaps it was a form of communication that the User built into himself to communicate with other Users outside. It was certainly easier than reaching an I/O port for communication with Creators. He turned his scan briefly to Quorra, receiving the same faint coding layer. He stopped his scan as Quorra jerked her head to glare at him.

He was inwardly surprised that she felt his scan. Only a handful of programs he knew had that capability. The other part of him was surprised by her visceral reaction to it. As a security program, he scanned others with and without their consent, a part of his duties and their understanding of his need to complete his duties. He even scanned the Users, though Flynn and now SamFlynn, proved that they were not able to feel his passive scans.

“Uh huh, all right, I'll try that. Thanks Lora,” SamFlynn seemingly finished whatever communication he had on the other end and nudged Alan-One with the toe of his boot. “Hey Alan, you can continue your coding once we get into the light runner. Light runner, got it? Transportation? Trying to see if my Dad's alive?”

“Yeah, got it,” Alan-One was clearly not listening. “Code, right...”

Tron caught SamFlynn making a very User gesture of rolling his eyes. He wanted to smile at the gesture, very much reminiscent of the User's father, but it did not feel right to him to seemingly make fun of his own Creator. The young User sighed and ran a gloved hand through his hair before catching his eye. Tron watched as something seemingly sparked behind SamFlynn's eyes.

“Alan, your program's standing here, waiting patiently for his disc back. Tron will probably wait until the end of the world because you're his Creator, but I for one would like to get moving.”

It seemed mentioning his name startled Alan-One out of his thoughts as he blinked and stared up at them as if he just noticed they were standing around him. “Oh...uh,” Alan-One seemingly made a movement as if to push something up his nose and instead, jammed his fingers against the bridge. He winced in annoyance before he scrambled up from the ground.

“Yesyesyes,” the Bit flashed three times.

“Oh, uh,” Tron never saw his Creator look so flustered before he seemingly cleared his throat and deactivated the lines of coding on his disc. Alan-One thrust his disc towards him and Tron blinked. “Here, been fixing a few things here and there. Some of your runtimes and processes should be a lot smoother. Your passive scanners should be working at maximum potential. Your energy levels have been stabilized. Tried to go easy on the coding so you couldn't really feel any significant changes, but it's the best I could do at the moment.”

Tron blinked, shock coursing through his processes at how  _thoughtful_ Alan-One was as he took his disc back. He absently slotted it in its holster on his back as he numbly nodded. He had not felt a single invasive touch in his processes during the brief time that he thought his Creator was only looking through code. When did Alan-One make the changes, he did not even know.

“Thank you,” he murmured, touched by the generosity and kindness his Creator showed him by fixing parts of his code without making it feel like someone was significantly altering it. He belatedly realized that what he first took as his Creator scrolling through code without making any alterations was in fact wrong. His Creator must have been changing the codes with his left hand.

Alan-One reached down and picked up the darkened disc, absently fiddling with it before he suddenly left them with only a look at Tron that he could not discern. It almost seemed to war between concern and an consternation that he was not sure who it was directed at.

“Have I said something wrong?” He asked SamFlynn.

“No,” the Bit flashed its red-spiked icosohedron before following Alan-One's wake.

Tron felt like he was missing the part of a very large puzzle and it rubbed him in the wrong way. His processes wanted to know,  _needed_ to know. It was his specialty as a security program. However, he layered the need under several subroutines, quelling it as best as he could. This was his Creator, his maker. He had no right to demand information as much as it countermanded his own lines of code. Added to the generosity of his Creator in repairing parts of his code without so much as an invasive reworking of his code, he successfully quelled that part of him.

SamFlynn reached out and clapped him on the shoulder, reminiscent of one of his father's gestures. “Alan's got a lot on his mind. He gets like that when things are bothering him that he doesn't have any control over.”

“Oh.”

“It's not you; at least I don't think it's you,” the User clapped him again and slung an arm around his shoulder, guiding him forward towards the light runner. “I think he's still processing the shock of the Grid and everything that went on with Dad in nearly the last thirty-years or so.”

Tron nodded as they approached the light runner. Quorra was already sitting in the driver's seat and Tron glanced over to see a slightly disconcerted look on SamFlynn's face as his arm dropped away from his shoulder.

“Really, Quorra?”

“I know the Outlands better than anyone, including the path to Flynn's sanctuary,” Quorra raised a challenging eyebrow at him.

“All right, but please, for the love of all that's holy, I'd like to keep my lunch intact,” SamFlynn seemed resigned as he rounded the runner and climbed aboard into the front seat. Tron saw Alan-One was already sitting in the backseat, staring a lines of orange coding – the disc that was previously inactive now glowing a orange in his hands. He nodded to Quorra as he rounded the runner and climbed into the backseat. Normally he would have preferred riding on his lightcycle, but since he lost both of his batons, he had no other mode of transportation.

As Quorra gunned the engine and started off, Tron watched as Alan-One absently reached up and grabbed the Bit with a gentle curl of his hand and brought it back down. The data mote flashed 'yes' once before it settled in a crook between the edge of the light runner and Alan-One's flowing, but sparsely illuminated garb.

Silence reigned in the light runner for several microns.

“Your code,” his Creator suddenly spoke up, voice rough. It took a moment for Tron to process that Alan-One was addressing him.

He stared at the lines of orange code and the disc. “Rinzler,” he stated quietly.

“Found it in the Sea.” His Creator suddenly shifted the disc from his lap to the small space that was between the two of them. “Unfortunately, on first glance, it looks like it took most of your original code, the ones involving your deep level processes and security protocols. A a lot of extraneous code was spliced together along with an underlying process function that is like attachments you were forced to use to circumvent what couldn't be replaced. There are remnants of bad code and viruses that looks like it was once cleaned up, but seems like it wasn't quarantined well enough.”

Tron frowned as Alan-One glanced up at him. “Were you infected with malware at any point?”

“Yes,” he said. “Twice.”

“Twice?” Alan-One looked back down at the disc and flipped through it quickly with both hands. “Tron, I'm only reading once.”

“Oh...” Tron paused as he thought back to the first and second time he was infected. The first time was by Dyson after he was first captured and imprisoned during Clu's initial rebellion. It hampered his ability to self-heal, draining him of his energy to the point where he would derezz instead of becoming tired. It prevented him from overclocking his systems like he normally would. The second time...if his memories served him correctly, he slowly lost himself to the persona that Clu called Rinzler. That was also the time Beck-

“I didn't get a chance to really sort through your runtimes, so maybe it's on your main disc?” Alan-One looked rather frustrated and distressed.

“I am sorry,” Tron remembered Flynn saying the words more than once in an attempt to mollify and comfort.

However, it had the opposite reaction in Alan-One. His Creator gave him a fierce look before holding up a finger and shaking it at him. “Don't you dare, Tron. Don't you dare apologize ever for this,” he gestured towards the disc, “it's not your fault and you have nothing to be sorry or ashamed.” His voice was heated,.“If Clu wasn't dead, I'd hunt him down and kill him myself for what he's done to you. If Flynn were still alive, I'd punch him in the face for the all of the mess and shit he left behind.”

Alan-One turned away, glaring at nothing in particular, his shoulders shaking with clear anger before he finally heaved in a deep breath and let it out slowly. Tron watched, silent, in slight terrified awe, as his Creator took another heaving breath before turning back.

“Sorry, Sam,” Alan-One called out, “your father-”

“S'okay,” SamFlynn shrugged, but did not turn back. Tron caught the undercurrent of a strained emotion in the younger Flynn's voice. “Dad's a bit of a dick. Maybe it's good that we can see if he's still really alive and then you can punch him in the face like you always wanted to, right?”

Alan-One snorted, nodding before deactivating the orange disc in his hands. He sighed and ran a hand across his face. Tron noted that his Creator looked so worn, so tired. Gone was the youthful vitality that he remembered from his diskette. In fact, he looked briefly at the aged Flynn.

“I think Clu pulled part of your code and twisted it to make Rinzler. I can't fix it unless I have both in front of me. And even then...” Alan-One glanced at him and lifted a hand to stop him from unhooking his main disc. “Not now, when we get to the sanctuary. Can't really fix coding while I'm bouncing around in the back of a Grid-equivalent of a dune buggy.”

Tron reluctantly let his hand drop and instead tentatively reached out for the disc that was once his own; was once Rinzler's. He picked it up and it felt immediately  _right_ , it felt familiar. He did not activate it, but instead stared at it. This disc, and the one hooked onto his back. He had shed so many voxels, so many programs' lives as Rinzler and as Tron. The stark memory of Ophelia, of the day he derezzed her, was still fresh in his processes. He glanced up at Quorra, staring at the back of her head. Did she know? Did they all know that the program who derezzed the beloved ISO leader was none other than the security program who was supposed to protect every inhabitant on The Grid?

There was no doubt that Quorra, Sam, and Alan-One knew he was once Rinzler, once Clu's lackey. But did Quorra know that it was Rinzler, it was  _Tron_ who derezzed Ophelia? It seemed the prudent thing for Clu to declare once the deed was done – who Ophelia's executioner was. His memories as Rinzler were perhaps the most fragmented. They came in bytes of data, sometimes just out of reach, but other times clear as his other processes. He suspected it was probably due to the corruption in the creation of Rinzler – a mindless obedient and ruthless system monitor of Clu's.

He promised himself that he would not dishonor her memory, nor the memory of others. He was given an extension on his runtimes in order to make up for his mistakes that affected so many. Even though his Creator said for him not to apologize for what Clu did, giving him an easy process to follow, Tron knew it was the wrong process to follow. He  _needed_ to defy the command.

“Quorra,” he stated in a quiet silence of the light runner. He could sense both Alan-One and SamFlynn start in surprise. “I...apologize for what happened to Ophelia.”

The answer to his silent query was immediate – Quorra stiffened, grip tightening against the wheel of the light runner. Tron grimaced. Clu must have broadcast her deresolution and made Rinzler infamous. It meant all on the Grid knew who derezzed the leader of the ISOs.

“You remembered,” the former ISO's voice was so flat that it sounded like it was processed through several audio filters.

“Yes,” he kept staring at the back of her head, unwilling to flinch or look away.

Quorra's grip on the wheel tightened again. For a nano, she looked like she was about to ask another question before she relaxed her grip and instead, shifted the gears, focused on the road. Silence fell in the runner once more, a fortuitous opportunity as Quorra slowed the car down, arriving at the familiar entryway that led up to Flynn's sanctuary.

As soon as she parked, SamFlynn leapt out of the car, clearly relieved that they arrived and more than likely to get away from the growing tension. Tron watched as Quorra exited, moving a little faster than he knew she could walk and frowned. He did not need to scan her to know she was furious with his apology and his admission that he derezzed her beloved leader. She joined Sam at the elevator and rather than waiting for Alan-One of all people, the elevator started to move upwards. Tron blinked – that was rather rude, even by program standards and she was a User.

However as he looked over to see if his Creator was offended by the lack of common courtesy, his processes were halted. Alan-One had a far away look on his face, contemplating some matter Tron had no insight into.

“Tron,” Alan absently reached up and rubbed his lip in thought, “what do you remember? As your time as Rinzler?”

“Fragments,” Tron replied honestly, “it seems to run on a runtime of its own. I remember certain sharp details, but it is like viewing them from a diskette.”

“And this whole thing with...Ophelia?”

“With clarity,” he met his Creator's gaze with a firm one of his own.

“Not fragments?”

“I have reason to believe I was...rectified three times before Clu's programming could take complete hold,” he replied quietly. “The third time was after Ophelia's deresolution. It is...the last clear process I have...” He reached for his disc and unhooked it. “I...can show you-”

“No,” Alan-One shook his head and for a nano, Tron wondered if it was in shame. He grimaced and made to put the disc back onto its mount before his Creator took hold of one end. “It is your memory. I don't want to put you through it again. Just show me the line of coding where it ends and I'll isolate it from there. Maybe it'll be a start to see if I can patchwork it with the disc that has most of Clu's Rinzler programming.”

Tron nodded, releasing the hold on his master disc as his Creator gathered up the other disc, the disc that was an orange red, the one containing most of his Rinzler coding. He had hoped his core programming was not affected, but based on Alan-One's words regarding deep-level processes and security protocols, it was not the case. Clu systematically corrupted him. It seemed like a miracle that he survived the Sea of Simulation, reboot and had most of his memories intact. But that was just it – he had none of the functions of his core programming as a system monitor left on his master disc. The corruption that was Rinzler took most of it, leaving him with only his passive sensors and smoothed out runtimes.

A disquieting process rose to the surface, unable to be buried under layers of encryption. “Alan-One,” he spoke up, “if the corruption cannot be fixed, will I have a purpose anymore on the Grid?”

There was a flash of yellow by Alan-One's side. Tron forgot the Bit was wedged by the door. However, the affirmative from the Bit was echoed by his Creator as he sighed and rubbed his face tiredly. “Tron, what is your directive?”

“I fight for the Users,” he said, still feeling proud of the declaration.

“Well, that's your core programming then,” his Creator gestured towards him. “from what I gathered, your master disc has the most basic lines from when I first made you. It's like a stripped down version. Do you remember back on ENCOM's servers when I first added the layers and layers of coding after compiling you?”

Tron nodded.

“Well, then you haven't lost your core programming then. You've only lost the tools that helped your programming,” Alan-One opened the door, stepping out as the Bit flew high in the air, seemingly happy to be freed from its confinement.

Tron wanted to protest his Creator's words, but quieted as he merely nodded and also got out of the runner. He saw his Creator look up to the ceiling before sighing, long and loud.

“You can say that I'm wrong, Tron. You don't always have to agree with me.”

“But...you're my Creator,” Tron was puzzled.

“I'm sure you've noticed that we're not infallible. We're not gods even though you think we are,” Alan-One looked at him with eyes that held seemingly infinite wisdom.

Tron's brow crinkled in consternation. Did Alan-One not understand? That everything before him, even the very foundation of Flynn's sanctuary was because Clu rebelled against Flynn's directives, that he thought his Creator wrong? He shook his head. “I...cannot process that, Alan-One.”

That sage look translated into a small smile as his Creator stared at him with a look that Tron saw several times on Flynn's face; mostly when he looked at Clu in the early days. If he had to put a User word to it, it looked paternal. “You just disagreed with me.”

“I...uh...” Tron could feel his processes whirl around him as he blinked.

“Small steps, I suppose, small steps,” Alan-One suddenly rounded the runner and gestured for him to follow, as they walked onto the elevator that came back down. It lit up and started its slow ascent.

“Alan-One,” Tron started, “I did not mean to disagree with you, but rather it was a misinterpretation.”

“Oh?” his Creator looked mildly surprised.

“I have seen disagreements, but to me it seems like it comes from either the lack of communication and understanding or miscommunication,” Tron replied, “the explanation or lack thereof is the root cause of a disagreement. My process is basic, I fight for the Users. If there is a threat to The Grid, I protect it at all costs unless a User comes to harm or is harmed by my inaction. And to do so, I must protect my own existence as my deresolution will not enable me to execute my basic programming.”

“So you feel that in order to execute your basic programming, your directive, you think the your tools are a fundamental part of your programming?”

“Yes,” Tron nodded.

“Did I just hear right?” SamFlynn suddenly interrupted them and Tron realized they arrived at the core of Flynn's sanctuary. “Did you program him to be three-law robotics compliant?”

Alan-One had a very odd expression on his face; as if he could not decide whether to be proud or miffed. Tron did not understand the exchange between SamFlynn and Alan-One. However, it seemed his Creator understood something of it as he said in a rather mild tone. “Seems like I did...”

“And Tron just used the logic of his programming to disagree-”

“I did not,” Tron cut in, shooting SamFlynn a look, “we are in the midst of communicating an understanding between ourselves.”

“Okay,” the User held up his hands in a placating manner, “no disagreements.”

“Sam,” the annoyance was back in Alan-One's voice as he arched a look at the younger Flynn, “shouldn't you start looking around? You know, like what we actually came here to do?”

“Yeah, yeah, on it. Quorra's in her room. Let her know if you want to eat something. I'm sure she knows where Dad's kept the executable file for green beans and a pork roast.”

“The what?”

“Alan, relax, I can tell that you just want to sit down and fix Tron's coding. I can handle it. We'll be here for a while anyways,” SamFlynn seemed more at ease than when he was in the runner and sauntered off.

“Users puzzle me,” Tron commented absently.

“Sam's not showing it, but he's more relieved that we got here in one piece than having to fight our way through The Grid,” Alan-One replied. “We didn't know if the system would be stable once we opened the portal and got in. Quorra mentioned there was always the fear that with Clu gone, the system integrity would be in jeopardy, that the system would fail completely and chaos would be rampant.”

Tron stretched his passive sensors out to their maximum, silently relishing at the feel of it. It felt so whole, like a part of him had been dormant for so long, just awakened. He received nothing back except for the three Users and one digital mote floating somewhere nearby. “Nothing,” he shook his head, “I don't sense any gridbugs, gridworms, or malware around us.”

His Creator nodded, the same small smile on his face. Let's set up camp outside on the balcony. Good of a place as any to talk.”

“Alan-One?”

“I'd like you to tell me what you've been doing on the Grid, Tron. I'd like you to tell me everything,” Alan-One said as they walked outside. The audio filter muffled the steps of Sam and Quorra on the inside. Tron reached the edge of the balcony and leaned against it, watching the distant glow of the I/O port. It reminded him of a beacon of hope. Before that, the glowing distant lines of Tron City, the main hub of the Grid, twinkled. It looked so deceptively peaceful, but Tron knew better.

“Flynn brought me onto the Grid from the ENCOM servers thousands of cycles ago. A vast space of _nothing_ that he claimed was a canvas to begin building a better system, a paradise. Flynn...” Tron let himself retreat to the happier memories, cocooned in the knowledge that there was no threat, that his Creator was finally with him after keenly feeling his absence for so long, and that he still had his basic core programming intact. “Flynn called it a digital frontier. I called it a digital paradise. But to me, The Grid was something else, a new beginning. A place of wonderment, of shared resources, a place of peace. In the end, it failed...”

 


	4. Reflections

To Alan, coding was a technical art form. It was all about precision, that one line of mistake, one line of wrong code, resulting in the collapse of a program, a system, even the internet itself. One line of code could result in exploitation, in the perversion and creation of something that could be corrupted. That was why his codes were precise, were defined and within the parameters they were designed for. It was this very work, coding, that he and Flynn were fundamentally different. Flynn coded by the seat of his pants; his games wildly popular, sometimes glitchy, but more often than not, a gigantic money maker for ENCOM. Flynn's coding was unorthodox and it got the job done, sometimes even faster than his own precision coding.

The code Alan stared showed Flynn's signature; messy, full of redundancies, and somehow, it worked. It also showed a majority of Tron's processes and protocols were on Rinzler's master disc. It seemed that when Tron was in the Sea of Simulation, his coding reset itself. However, it did not wipe the corruption clean. Only a complete reformat of his program would completely wipe all traces of the corruption clean. Alan did not want that for his program – not after what he knew now.

He never really believed programs could be like him and Sam – human. But Quorra disproved that notion quite thoroughly. However, a very small part of him rebelled against that notion, using the excuse that Quorra was an ISO; an unknown manifest of The Grid that served no discernible purpose. But after he first laid eyes on Tron, on his program, lying on the edges of the Sea of Simulation, something protective overcame him. He did not want to reformat Tron; not after hearing the firm declaration of his directive.

Perhaps there was once a time that Alan would have thought to scrap all of Tron's code and rewrite his program from scratch. But that moment was long gone and he was now left with a mess of Flynn's code – Clu's code – and the feeling of deep seeded anger at how much his own precision coding was destroyed. More than once, as he tried to fix the lines, he wished he could kill Clu and punch Flynn in the face. It was only Tron's narrative that kept his anger from showing and kept him firmly parked on the ground repairing his program's damaged code.

Several vials of what Tron called unrefined energy were placed near them. They both drank from the small stockpile Alan brought with him into the Grid, a preventive measure he and the others came up with before they entered. Since they did not know what state The Grid would be in; he, Sam and Quorra all coded certain things needed for extended survival. Alan happen to code in regular coffee which turned into unrefined energy. Sam and Quorra preferred the energy drinks like Red Bull which coded into refined energy.

The empty vials were a testament to how long he sat there coding with Tron talking to him. He would not admit, but it was still odd to hear his own voice, a more youthful one, coming from his program's mouth. It was also unusual to hear how worn down his program sounded. This Tron was a far cry from the exuberant, cheerful and optimistic program that Flynn claimed to have met on the old ENCOM servers. He inwardly shook his head as he squinted against the lines of code. His eyes were blurring and he rubbed at one with his hand.

“Alan-One?” Tron stopped his narrative at his movement, his voice quiet, thoughtful.

Alan did not need to look at his program to know that Tron wore a forever youthful version of his face and that it had a pensive frown on it. The likeness to his younger self was easier to manage as he had to do was pretend Tron was a son of sorts. The same pensive frown appeared on his own face as that particular disquieting thought reared its head. It was like the missing piece of a puzzle he did not know he had finally sliding into place. Throughout his narrative, Tron kept mentioning Flynn's odd concept of a son and of family – and it was clear his security program did not quite understand the concept even though he sought to emulate parts of it with Yori, with Ophelia, even with some of the other programs he met and were friends with.

Alan realized that his anger at the lines of corrupted code was also familiar – it was when Jet got into trouble, or Sam got hurt because of some bully at school. He supposed that in a way, Tron was his son, albeit one he unknowingly abandoned because he did not understand Flynn's words back then.

“I'm sorry, Tron,” he started quietly as he shook his head. He found that he was unable to meet his program's gaze. “I'm sorry for leaving you alone for this long, for not realizing sooner what happened. Everything that's happened isn't your failure Tron. It's mine.”

“But Alan-One-”

“User error,” the corner of his lips quirked up in a crooked smile, “it comes down to User error. You did what you were programmed to do, what you've always done. You were programmed to-”

“-Protect the citizens of The Grid from any and all threats, not to become one of them,” Tron's gaze narrowed a little, his expression mulishly stubborn to the point that Alan suddenly wanted to laugh in joy at how much like _himself_ he saw in his program, but refrained from doing so.

“Programmed as a _security_ program,” he continued as if Tron had not spoken, “and you tried to protect the threat of The Grid that was Clu. It's my own fault that I didn't believe Flynn enough to give you the upgrades you needed to combat something like Clu. It's Flynn's fault for not realizing how big of a threat Clu was. Don't blame yourself for something that could have been reined in if your Users, hell even your Creator, should have been more aware of.”

“But-”

“Tron,” Alan held up a hand to stop him from speaking, “it's not your fault. All you can do now is learn from this, added to your programming like you always have, and grow from it. I created you to learn, and watch and for that, for everything you've done, you have been admirable in all respects. From what you've told me so far, you've all but ignored everyone's opinion of you, even respected those opinions of what they think you've done right or wrong. You've adhered to your programming and kept the citizens of the Grid safe as much as possible given the circumstances. You tried to keep peace when the others declared it to be none and you fought for that peace. You never gave up.”

He noticed that Tron made an abortive movement to something on his left shoulder before he hesitated and slowly withdrew a small diskette. “I...Flynn gave me this...from you...” There was an almost child-like hesitation as Tron offered it to him and Alan reached out and took it, activating it with a flick of the switch.

_“Hello Tron. Flynn told me that you’ve been doing wonderful things in the new system he’s built. I don’t know exactly what, but the stories he tells are pretty interesting at times...”_

Alan smiled faintly at the image of himself, so very young then, still so full of doubts and had not known what he was recording except for Kevin's prompt of 'your program's kind of depressed, cheer it up, man!' He flicked it off, remembering the words he had spoken so long ago, a side effect of his eidetic memory. He handed the diskette back to Tron who took it and rubbed it in between his fingers as if it was something sacred, and oddly like a safety blanket of sorts. “You've kept it on you all this time.”

Tron blinked and nodded slowly, “...Even as Rinzler...”

“There's your answer then,” he smiled gently at his program who looked at him a little confused. He wanted to tell him, but realized that Tron would be for the better if he figured out the answer on his own and instead reassured him. “No matter if programs end up blaming you, just know that _I_ don't blame you. I blame myself, that I wasn't there to help, that I wasn't there-” he stuttered for a brief moment before repeating himself. “That I wasn't there.” _For you_... _for my son_.

Alan knew he was a terrible father, maybe worse than Flynn. Whereas Flynn had the excuse of being missing in the Grid with no sign or trace of him, Alan had no such excuse. Though he and Lora made their relationship work with the long distance between California and Washington D.C., he had no excuse to miss many of Jethro's moments growing up, too consumed with ENCOM, with keeping the company on the right track. Too many meetings and not enough birthday parties, holidays, even vacation trips. He had no excuse to try to foster Sam after his grandfather died and his grandmother could not take care of one rambunctious twelve-year-old. He knew Jet resented that, resented Sam intruding into his life and taking up time with his father when he had none. The two were once friends, but grew apart after Alan had tried to foster parent Sam. Even Lora noticed, but tried her best to explain it to Jet.

And as much as he wanted to call Tron his own son, his very own program, he knew he could not say those words without sounding like a complete hypocrite. He and Jet had begun to repair their relationship after Jet entered college, but even now Alan knew it was still fraught with hurt feelings and a lost childhood. He was only grateful that Jet had actually come to help them with this current problem and was monitoring things from the outside with Lora.

Tron stopped fidgeting with the diskette and placed it back in its hiding spot, absently pressing it to ensure that it was still there. He nodded slowly again, seemingly accepting his words, but Alan could tell his actions as Rinzler and guilt for what he had done still weighed upon him. He sighed inwardly, at least Tron now knew that his own Creator forgave him and did not blame him. It was up to Tron to realize it for himself, but he could at least help the process along.

He set the disc he called Rinzler's disc to the side as he rummaged around the pockets of his jacket and pulled out two more vials. Offering another one to Tron, his program took it, snapping the cap off and drinking it in one motion. He seemed more energized, the vials of unrefined energy doing him good, brightening his subdued circuitry a soft glowing white. It was probably a miracle that Tron managed to stay awake and not derezz or run out of energy for so long in the Sea of Simulation.

Alan flipped his own cap off, but took a sip of the vial. Digital coffee still tasted like coffee in his opinion and brewed at just the right temperature. He would have to thank Roy for the unusual coding once he got out of The Grid. Footsteps behind him made him turn from where he sat near the reflecting pool on the balcony of the sanctuary to see Sam stretching his arms wide, in the midst of a rather obnoxiously large yawn.

“You're still awake?”

“Yeah,” Alan wondered why Sam was yawning.

“Geez Alan, it's been at least twenty hours since we've arrived. Jet, Lora, and Roy are already on rotation outside. Aren't you the least bit tired?”

“I...haven't noticed,” Alan felt a little sheepish and surprised that he lasted this long awake while coding. He gestured towards the neat pile of vials that he had been sharing with Tron and Sam only shook his head. “Did you find anything yet that can give us a clue?”

“Alan...” Sam sighed, “and no, we looked through every single place, the hidden drawers, everything. Nothing yet. I was going to tackle the coding on Dad's sanctuary after some _sleep_ though.”

“It is my fault for not realizing Users had sleep cycles like most programs do,” Tron spoke up quietly. “Alan-One, please, get some rest.”

Alan only gave a look at his program before lifting the inactive disc up. “Since you're here Sam, might as well explain this to you. You too Tron.” His program immediately became more alert. “I think I've pulled most of the malware and bad coding from the disc based on the timeline you gave me regarding the memory of Ophelia,” he started, “but...there's a catch.”

“There's always a catch,” Sam groused.

“If I merge this disc, right now with your current master disc, it's definitely not reversible. Not if you want to recover all of your previous modules, additions, deep-core programming and protocols.”

“So?”

“So,” Alan continued, “I'll need to continue to run through more code layers to make sure that the first and second instance of the malware, of Clu's corruption doesn't become dominant once more. I can build in firewalls, safeties, but it's not a guarantee. Even my precision coding doesn't beat Clu or rather Flynn's on-the-fly style. It's fundamentally different in respects. There is another way, but you're not going to like it.”

“What other way?”

“Reformatting,” he said plainly. “I reformat you, start from the beginning and build your root code up. You'll lose everything, all of the knowledge you've had since the ENCOM days. You won't remember anything. But you'll be completely clean and free from Clu's corruption.”

That certainly got his program's attention as he sat pensively. “I...”

“Maybe we should table this decision for later,” Alan was surprised at Sam's sudden interruption.

He glanced over to see something in the younger man's eyes that he did not see before. There was concern, worry, and an emotion he could not identify. “Besides, Alan, you look like you're about to collapse even though I see you've drank like half the supply of coffee we brought.” There was the almost imperceptible shake of Sam's head and Alan understood the unspoken message.

He admitted to himself that such a decision needed to be processed, to given some thought. He nodded and stood up, feeling his joints creak and his muscles pull from sitting down for too long and grimaced.

“Alan-One!” Tron's voice was sharp with concern and the program was suddenly next to him, helping him get to his feet.

“I'm fine,” he waved his thanks to Tron as he absently rubbed his hipbone, feeling the muscle pull tight. “Just...too damn old.”

“That bed, over there,” Sam pointed them towards the only bed that was in the spacious room and Alan hobbled over there before dropping unceremoniously into it. He sighed and looked up to see the same pensive expression on his program's face. “Tron, don't make a decision yet. Just think on it. Process what you know and what _you_ want to do. Don't base your decision on us, on what might happen, or anything else. It is your runtime, your life we're talking about here.”

Tron nodded silently as Alan made himself comfortable on the top of the bed. At least the mattress and pillows were not uncomfortable. He saw Sam moving towards one of the smaller rooms connected to the large living space and surmised that there was probably bedrooms attached.

“Please get some rest, Alan-One. I'll keep watch,” Tron moved away, heading back outside where the program adopted an at-ease militaristic stance, his eyes facing towards the faint glow of the portal and the distant lights of the city.

Sleep came quickly for Alan as the exhaustion of coding almost non-stop filled him. He closed his eyes and was instantly asleep, dreaming of the stories his program told him.

* * *

By Tron's estimate, half of a milicycle passed before his passive senses became alerted to movement within Flynn's sanctuary. His passive scanners told him the former ISO Quorra was awake and when she approached, he only turned his head briefly to acknowledge her presence.

“Quorra,” he greeted neutrally. He did not need to look nor scan her further to know that she was still hostile towards him. The buzzing activation of a disc only made him sigh.

“I will not fight back,” he said quietly.

“Why?” Her voice was hard. “Your discs are right there.”

“I cannot fight back,” he said and glanced at her. “Do you know what you scan as?”

“You shouldn't scan programs like that-”

“It is part of my protocols, my coding. It is who I am, Quorra,” he corrected her. “I scan to neutralize threats to the system before they can become a threat.”

“It's rude,” she glared at him. The glow of her active disc threw jagged shadows of light between them.

He snorted a quiet bark of laughter and she frowned at him, her grip on her disc tightening. “What do you find so humorous?”

“Ophelia said the same thing...once, long ago.”

“Don't you dare say her name. You do _not_ deserve the privileged of saying her name.”

He smiled sadly. “I know.”

“You remember,” she snarled at him, “killing her. Why? Why did you kill her? She had nothing to do with encouraging the rebellion! She was advocating peace between the ISOs and Basics! Yet you cut her down, you did it without a second thought on Clu's orders! I don't believe for one that you were mindlessly following orders under Clu. Don't think you've fooled me, like you've fooled your own Creator and Sam that you didn't know what you were doing as Rinzler. You've obviously retained the memories, you know what you did. Your hands are covered in her voxels, in her databytes and the bytes of thousands of others. You are no better than Clu.”

Tron stared at her, letting her finish her impassioned speech. He could not interrupt her because she was right in all aspects. Even though he told Alan-One and SamFlynn that he remembered fragments, bits and pieces of his time under Clu's corruption as Rinzler, it still meant he remembered enough to know what he did, how he betrayed his own ideals, was corrupted by Clu. Yet Alan-One was giving him a choice, a chance that he felt he was unworthy. It seemed Alan-One ignored what he said and told him that he did not have a choice when he was Rinzler. But he broke free of the corrupted programming and that in of itself was a choice. He chose, as remnants of Tron, as remnants of Rinzler, to fight for the Users. He chose to spare SamFlynn in the arena because something inside of him was still Tron, was still fighting for the Users. He spared Quorra and brought her to Clu even though he could have easily dispatched her and hunted down Flynn and his son right when they disembarked the solar sailer.

All were conscious decisions, driven by his programming as Tron and as Rinzler.

“Say something!” Quorra raised her disc higher.

Tron shook his head. “I-” He paused as he felt a flicker on his passive sensors. He held up a hand to stop Quorra from saying anything else as he narrowed the sensors to where he felt the flicker. It brushed up against him like a ghostly familiar feeling and at the same time, one that made him dread its arrival after being dormant for so long. Tron opened his eyes and stared at Quorra. “Gridbugs...coming towards us, and a gridbug leader too.”

Her furious expression morphed into one that could only be described as a cross between concern and horror. He was pleased that she still remembered how much of a threat they were on The Grid. “Where?” she stated, lowering her disc.

“On the path towards the sanctuary,” Tron made a movement to grab his disc before he remembered they were on the ground in front of him, inactive.

He frowned.

“Stay here, don't even think of using your discs,” Quorra noticed the abortive gesture before deactivating her disc and hurrying back inside. He watched as Quorra rushed past Alan-One who was still sleeping before hurrying into the side hallway where SamFlynn rested.

Moments later, the younger Flynn hurried out, the lights in the sanctuary reacting to his presence by lighting up. It also woke Alan-One up with a startled groan as he sat up and blinked owlishly at both SamFlynn and Quorra hurrying to the elevator to take them down to the ground level. It was clear both were going to fight off the gridbugs and its leader, judging by the batons Quorra and Sam held.

“What's going on?” Alan-One rubbed his eyes.

“Gridbugs, stay here Alan, we're going to get rid of them,” SamFlynn called out as the elevator descended.

“Gridbugs? What the heck are gridbugs?” Tron heard his Creator grouse before he stood up and walked over. “Tron?”

“I do not believe my presence among them fighting against gridbugs would be welcomed,” Tron replied as he gestured towards his inactive discs.

“Seems that way,” his Creator rubbed the back of his head, making some of his hair stick up in places. It was a little odd as he thought a User's form would stay the same. “Also, maybe good since your security modules are in the Rinzler disc and if you went out with just your master disc, not much you can do.”

“Ah,” Tron grimaced.

“Are those the gridbugs?” Alan-One peered over the balcony and Tron saw the writhing mass of blue-white electronic garble hurling towards them. His passive sensors were pinging alerts of the incoming threat and his fingers twitched. The need to execute his protocols to take the discs no matter what was on it and use it against the gridbugs was strong. However, the glowing forms of SamFlynn and Quorra suddenly appeared, running towards the mass. It did nothing to tamp down on the protocol and instead, only served to heighten it.

Users were running headlong into danger.

“Flynn did not know what they were and my scans and processes into them only produced a hypothesis that the gridbugs were related to the ISOs in the fact that they both came from the Sea of Simulation.”

“Anomalies?”

“We truly did not know. But Clu took advantage of this fact to spread fear into the populace and continue to turn Basics against ISOs,” Tron replied, his voice tight as he fought against the protocols. He curled one of his hands into a fist as he saw the distant flashing forms of Quorra and Sam, both hurling their discs, derezzing a few of the smaller bugs, but the leader was unharmed.

“What are they?”

“I could not scan their datashards and they had unusual shielding within them. This only further the theory when an ISO by the name of Ariadne somehow was corrupted into a gridbug hybrid of sorts. Her disc was recovered, but I did not have the opportunity to scan and download its contents to verify or disprove the connection between gridbugs and ISOs.” he replied, flexing his curled hand back and forth. The motion did not go unnoticed by his Creator.

SamFlynn was suddenly hurled back, but quickly got up and set himself defensively as Quorra managed to score a hit on the gridbug leader. However, it seemed her hit did nothing as she was batted aside by an electronic tentacle. She hit the rocky outcropping to which SamFlynn rushed to her aid.

He flexed his hand again.

He needed to fight. Need to protect the Users. If it required his discs to be together, he would risk it all.

A motion out of the corner of his eyes made him turn from the fight to see Alan-One picking up both discs, holding them in his hands. There was an unreadable expression on his Creator's face before to Tron's surprise, he merged the two discs together, locking it in place. Both discs lit up, his master disc a soft glowing white, the one that carried all of his security protocols as Rinzler and as Tron glowing a burning orange color. To his chagrin, some of the orange began to bleed into the soft white, but stopped as it only lit the barest milimeter of the edges of his master disc.

Alan-One handed him the discs. “The coded lines I built hopefully will hold up. I don't know what will happen once you transfer the protocols over since I didn't get a chance to scrub through the merger. I know it's taking away your choice of whether to be reformatted-”

“Quorra and SamFlynn need my help. I'd rather risk my protocol and command line integrity than to let them be hurt or derezzed here,” Tron shook his head as he hesitantly reached out. He grabbed hold of the other end of the disc.

“And that is your true core programming, Tron,” Alan-One whispered. “You do not need any of the coding from myself, Clu, or otherwise to know that this is your core programming. That you will fight, even if it means risking it all.” He released his hold on the disc. “I know you will stay true, Tron.”

Even as the words left his Creator's lips, Tron could already feel the malicious code that he was intimately familiar with crawl through him. He did not need to holster his disc to its mount to do a full reset to feel it rush through him. He could only trust in Alan-One's words and closed his eyes briefly as he let the processes that made him who he was reboot itself. The familiar feelings of his tools, his abilities, everything that made him and made him Rinzler felt heady. He activated his helmet as he knew what he had to do and opened his eyes.

The dual disc in his hand snapped on with a familiar buzzing hiss. His passive sensors pinged the threat that the gridbug leader was setting off. It was time to finish this. Tron took two steps off of the balcony before leaping downward, disc extended. He would protect the Grid from all threats.

 


	5. Tron's Turn (Scars Suite)

_Tron's Turn (Scars Suite)_

 

Alan saw the moment Clu's malicious programming tried to take over Tron, his program's subdued lights flickering orange before reverting to its soft white glow. However, a thin sliver of orange line among each pinpoint of light told him the containment coding he put into the discs was holding...for now. Alan stepped back as his program leapt down from the balcony, landing with relative ease and took off. Even before Tron reached Sam and Quorra, Alan watched the single disc fly towards the sparking electric mass.

It hit it with such force that Alan could have sworn it gave off an unearthly, feedback-sounding howl of pain. The howl buzzed right through his ears, but was suddenly cut off as Tron reached the creature and batted it ruthlessly away with some kind of hexagonal shielding he brought up with his right hand. His left retrieved the disc that curved back to him. There was not even a single bit of hesitancy in Tron's movements as he immediately began slashing this way and that with the disc. He pushed his way through the mass, cutting apart the tendrils even though Alan was sure they hitting him.

The writhing blue-white glow grew brighter and brighter as Tron cut through the layers before it was almost too bright; just as another electronic howl rendered the air. It was abruptly cut off as the gridbug leader pixelated and collapsed into shards of inoperable data. All around them, the gridbugs that followed the leader collapsed or were finished off by Sam and Quorra.

Alan watched, an emotion he thought was a cross between fear and awe passing through him. “That's some coding, Bradley,” he muttered mostly to himself. Tron ripped apart the digital creature as if it was nothing. He did not whether to be afraid because of his own coding that made Tron who he was or in awe. But fear was perhaps overshadowing the awe as watched Tron stand in the middle of the pile of voxels, disc still active, the hexagonal shielding fading away.

Sam and Quorra were cautiously approaching Tron who had not retracted his bullet-shaped helmet. Alan caught Sam's glance up towards him before turning back. Quorra was saying something, too faint for Alan to pick up from his vantage point nor was her comms active. However, her baton was glowing and pointed at Tron while her disc was held defensively. Some more words were exchanged, Quorra with a sudden stricken look on her face. Alan glanced at Sam to see his brows knitted in concern, but it seemed like the danger passed as Sam lowered his disc, putting it back onto its mount.

Alan watched as Sam reached a hand out towards Tron, but seemed to address Quorra who still held her stance. She looked torn and angry now, and she said something, short and to the point. Alan watched as Tron slowly nod before deactivating his disc. However, as he lowered his left hand, his right one came up and Alan saw the the flare of the hexagonal shielding pop up once more. Tron extended his hand towards Quorra who grimaced.

Clearly it meant something to her, but what, Alan did not know. He watched as she studied it for a long moment before finally lowering her her disc and baton, deactivating both. At the same time, Tron lowered his right hand and let the shielding fade before he turned and started to head back towards the sanctuary. Alan caught a glimpse of Sam reaching for Quorra before he turned from the balcony and headed into the sanctuary to meet his program.

He did not have to wait long by the elevator as Tron rode up in it alone. He stepped off and it started to lower itself back down, more than likely to pick up Quorra and Sam.

“Tron?” It was eerie seeing his own reflection in the bullet-shaped helmet.

“Alan-One,” Tron's voice did not sound as precise or clear before the merging of his discs. Instead, it sounded rather flanged, almost as if his processes were slowed. His program reached behind him and pulled his disc from its mount before handing it to him. As soon as Alan took it, the helmet retracted and he blinked in surprise.

“Tron...”

“I can feel the return of the malware from the first time Clu and his programs attempted to corrupt my programming,” his program's voice still sounded flanged and Alan realized it was probably a part of the malware corruption. Still, he could not help but stare at the long jagged scar that oozed voxels of an unhealed wound across his program's face. It was very hard for him to tamp down on the returning surge of anger that filled him. More than once in the last day or so, he wished Clu was alive so he could pick the program apart, code by code.

Instead, Alan activated the hard-light interface of the dual discs and it came up in jagged lines of orange and white, a rotating image of Tron's head with the same jagged scar. Occasionally it glitched into the bullet-shaped helmet he wore. He tapped onto it and it went deeper, revealing a spherical shell that housed modules and protocols. Alan instantly recognized the ones he wrote, but they were mixed into the ones that indicated the previous two times of corruption Tron mentioned. He tapped deeper, revealing lines of code and frowned.

“You're using your masking subroutine,” he glanced up at his program and saw him give a small nod. “Why?”

“I...” Tron quieted, “you have done so much for me, Alan-One. You need your rest-”

“Bullshit, Tron,” Alan glared at his program as the hum of the elevator ascending broke through the silence. “Show me, please. Let me help. You're not the only one to carry this burden.”

Tron's expression morphed into a grimace before he sighed and closed his eyes, or rather, closed his eye as the one that was damaged by the malware was clearly not visible. Not even a second later, the masking subroutine dissolved, revealing the true extent of the injuries and malware his program took on with the merger of the discs. Alan was glad years and years of being on the board for ENCOM gave him the necessary poker face as he forced himself to not react to how _damaged_ the malware was. It also made him realized the testament of how resilient his program was in face of such devastating malware running through his system.

“All right,” he reached out and gently took his program by his arm as Sam and Quorra arrived. To their credit, they did not say a word except for their surprised expressions. “Let's get back to work Tron.”

His program opened his eyes and followed him silently back out to the balcony. Alan guided him to sit down near the pool of coded water before fishing out another vial of unrefined energy from his pack. “Your energy levels are down.”

“Thank you,” Tron took the vial and downed the whole thing in one swallow.

Alan rubbed his nose, making to push his glasses up before he remembered he didn't have them in the Grid. Instead, he sighed, cracking his knuckle a bit and started to pick through the lines of code. “Is the malware on your armor and body separate from the one on your face?”

“Yes,” Tron replied, seemingly more at ease now that it was just the two of them sitting outside on the balcony once more. He supposed even he would not want anyone to see him at his most vulnerable. “I think the damage was two-fold. The first sustained when I fought Clu after Flynn escaped. The second time, was when I was in captivity.”

“Captivity?”

“I was not immediately rectified,” Tron grimaced, “and a fellow security monitor who followed Clu attempted to convince me to self-change my processes and protocols.”

“Self-rectification?” Alan asked, mostly to himself as he started to slowly type, trying to find the best way to erase the malware without harming Tron any further. “As in convincing an enemy combatant to defect?”

“Yes,” his program replied.

Alan glanced up towards Tron to see him grimace a little and glanced back down at his work. “Damn, this hit your self-repair routines too.”

“I can endure it, Alan-One,” Tron replied tightly.

He glanced up at his program once more, pressing his lips together as he studied Tron for a moment. He wanted to ask him why he did not request that Alan firewall the first time Clu tried to rectify him before he realized his program's reasons. “It's more than the memory of Ophelia, correct?”

Tron reluctantly nodded. His program knelt down before him before reaching out with a finger to brush against his own lines of code on the disc. They moved so quickly before showing a completely red sector of coding that Alan could tell was heavily fragmented.

“These are my memories of the hundreds of cycles I was truly Rinzler. I do not know if they can be fully recovered having such fragmentation,” his program brushed his code back a few and Alan saw that though the red lines of fragmented coding was still there, there were bits and lines of white before the red turned into an orange hue filled with pockets of grey and white lines. Finally he returned to the point where Alan had been trying to pull out the malware.

“There are things I need to remember, that I need to atone for,” his program sat back against the wall.

Alan considered his program's words before nodding once. “All right,” he replied, “I understand. But you also have to understand, this malware that was first coded into you, it's not easy to pull out. It's coded into your self-repair modules and it might end up destroying them too. I can write you new ones, but until the malware on your face is gone, it'll probably corrupt that too. You have your security modules back, but until I can properly write the self-repair coding, please be careful.”

Tron nodded.

Alan sighed and started to work. “This ain't gonna be easy and it ain't gonna be pretty,” he said mostly under his breath as he rubbed his hands together and started to work. “That hexagonal shielding,” he asked as he started to type a few lines, “is that...”

“Ophelia's gift.” Out of the corner of his eye, Alan saw the flare of the shielding appear on his program's hand. He glanced at it briefly, amazed at the beauty and precision of its shape and size.

“And you gave her the masking subroutine as a gift in return?”

“She wished to blend among her people and even among the programs from time to time,” Tron's voice was a little wistful. “I wanted to give her a sense of normalcy, a sense of belonging and purpose. I hoped with the masking subroutine, she would feel at ease. Flynn said they were special to him.”

“That they would change the world,” Alan murmured as he turned back to continue his work on the code. “Before he was stuck on The Grid, he visited me two days before. I thought he was crazy, unhinged. He kept saying he cracked it, that he was going to change science, medicine, religion, everything and anything that was in our world. Flynn had that personality, you know, infectious, able to convince you that you can do anything and that he was able to give you the world.”

He continued to code. “He did give ENCOM the world, his games, his software and coding enabled the company to succeed in ways no one would have imagined. Once he got proof that Dillinger was stealing his patents, he was able to create games that no one could have imagined. Even created several games based off of his adventures with you on the ENCOM server. He became CEO, Chief Executive Officer and the leader of ENCOM.

“He never told me or Lora though, about those adventures,” Alan sighed, “don't know why. Maybe he was afraid, maybe he thought we would warn him off? He did ask me if he could borrow you for a project he was working. Back then I didn't think much of it and agreed. Didn't realize what I know now. Then he came to me a couple of years later and told me to say something inspiring to you.”

The small movement of motion made Alan glance up to see Tron touch his shoulder with his opposite hand as if to remind himself the diskette was still there. He nodded and turned back as he rearranged the patterns and codes into blocks. “It took us a while to realize Flynn was gone,” he flicked a few fingers onto the hard-light project and the lines of code disappeared into a new formatting view of blocks. There were greyed out sections and sections where white-orange clashed with the grey of the malware. “How's the firewall holding?”

“I can feel it, like gridworms crawling under my armor, but it doesn't penetrate any further,” Tron replied.

“Good,” Alan replied, “let me know if it changes immediately.” He started to pull at the grey blocks and heard a small stutter that sounded like an overclocked harddrive emerge from Tron. A quick glance over told him that his program's lips were pinched together in an effort to not show his discomfort. His chest showed otherwise. The grey was pulling bright aqua-blue voxels as it started to peel away. Alan thought it was akin to ripping open a wound judging by the visual he was getting.

“When we realized Flynn was actually missing, we searched for him,” he turned back to his work and continued his narrative. He hoped that what he was saying would distract Tron from the procedure. “Lora did what she could from Washington D.C., uh, that's another city like-”

“Argon and Arjia City,” Tron bit out and Alan glanced over to see his program with his head back, eyes pointing to the sky as he fought the pain he was clearly feeling.

“Focus on my voice, Tron, focus,” he continued and saw his program roll his neck forward, hanging his head in an apparent attempt to nod. “Lora did what she could, but after a couple of years, the ENCOM board wanted Flynn officially declared dead so they could move on. I was the Chief Operating Officer of the company by then, like a second-in-command if you will, and they wanted to get back to normal operations.

“Sam didn't like it, but I declared Flynn dead and took shared guardianship of him with his grandparents,” Alan could feel the malware clinging onto the remnants of his program's code as he pinched his fingers together to try to loosen its grip. It came away slowly, like something that was already heavily scabbed and refusing to reveal the new skin yet. “I know that didn't make Jet happy either.”

“J-Jet?” A shaky breath from his program followed the question.

“Jethro Eugene Bradley, my son,” Alan replied proudly before glancing at Tron, “actually now that I think about it, he technically could be your brother in a unique sense.”

“Based on what I know, that could be pretty cool,” Jet's voice suddenly cut in, buzzing through his teeth and Alan nearly lost his grip on one of the blocks of malware. “Sam's gonna be jealous once he hears this.”

He ignored Jet's words and continued. “ENCOM had a few years where it was considered stagnant, no growth, no development. I became CEO in that time and after a year of that, was relieved of my position, but allowed to stay on the Board since I was one of their most senior coders and developers.” He glanced over to see Tron with an expression that could have been a cross between confused and in pain. “Software and hardware were growing by then. Rival companies, all had ideas, all wanted in and ENCOM needed someone who understood that market. I'll admit, I really didn't know. I didn't have Flynn's flare, style, or understanding about what would make consumers happy. I just knew I liked precision coding. I was good at it. I liked figuring out the internals and make sure everything worked precisely. Not really good material for a CEO to be; but then again, Flynn was probably not the best CEO – considering he was late for everything and forgot some important things from time to time.

“I also was busy taking care of Sam, tutoring him when his grandparents died. Tried to help Jet too, but since he lived with Lora in D.C. for a majority of the school year and only came to visit during summer and winter breaks, it was hard. I'd like to think we made it work...”

Alan hoped that there was another interruption from his son, but when none came forth he smiled bracingly to himself as he stopped his ministrations. Another quick glance to where Tron sat made him smile sympathetically. Tron looked so worn, his soft white lights with faint edgings of orange heavily faded. He was slumped by the retaining wall, one hand covering the aqua-blue glow of exposed voxels from what Alan successfully peeled away. The wound itself did not bleed datashards, but it looked angry and deep.

“How are you holding up?” he asked quietly.

“Fine...” was the faint reply from his program.

“We're almost done for now,” Alan reassured him, “don't think it's wise to do it all in one sitting when your energy levels are so low. I'm going to insert the repaired code into the patches that I was able to extract, okay? The self-healing ability won't activate until all of the malware is gone – I can't do anything about that, but the parts that are exposed should have healthy coding and stronger reinforcement on your armor.”

Tron merely nodded.

Alan turned back and started to take the clear white blocks that he had coded and inserted them into the places where the former lines of malware had corrupted and eaten away at his program's code. There was an audible sigh of relief and the corner of his lips quirked up in a small, but sad smile. Jet's silence regarding how he was raised and the near slip that he ignored Tron for so long weighed heavily on Alan. He really was a poor father, neglecting his real son, his digital son, and trying to raise Sam as a son in Flynn's place.

Once he placed the last fixed code in, he deactivated the hard-light function on Tron's discs and handed it back to him along with two vials of the unrefined energy. His program took the disc and the vials with a brief nod of thanks before Alan stretched his arms out.

“Thank you, Alan-One,” his program looked sheepish as he snapped open one of the vials and slowly drank what was inside. “I apologize for making you fix this code-”

“Tron,” Alan held up a hand in warning. “What did I say?”

His program looked a little sheepish, but nodded in reminder of what he had said earlier about not apologizing. “Then please, get some rest.”

“Yeah,” Alan suddenly yawned and stood up, the cartilage cracking in his knees in protest before he glanced around. “You're going to continue to monitor?”

“I was created to not need any function of a sleep cycle, Alan-One,” his program smiled wanly.

“Then let me say this. If you do detect gridbugs or anything hostile, please let Quorra and Sam handle it first. I know it goes against all of your protocols, but as a command from your Creator, you need to rest and let your coding adapt.”

“I understand,” Tron looked solemn.

“Good,” Alan replied before he ascended the steps up to the main room and saw Sam in the far corner where the long line of books was. Sam looked like he had derezzed part of the bookshelf. “Sam?”

“I'm checking the coding of Dad's sanctuary. Quorra's downstairs, doing the same. You might want to take the spare room on the left. It might get a bit noisy if I accidentally mess up a line of code.”

“You can read the code of this place?”

“Seems like it. Might be because Dad had it keyed to himself and Quorra,” Sam shrugged, engrossed in his work.

“Ah. Well, mind waking me in about six or so hours or if you find something before that?”

“Sure,” Sam nodded and Alan moved away. But before he got far Sam spoke up again. “Hey, is Tron all right?”

“He will be,” Alan replied. He could still remember how much Sam had been obsessed about Tron when he was younger. Flynn's marketing scheme and figurines were such a big hit for ENCOM and for Sam. Even Jet was playing with them whenever he was over during the holidays and summers. A favorite game the boys loved to play was light cycle tag where they just rode around their bikes for hours. Both wanted to be Tron, and neither wanted to be Clu until Lora made them compromise and switch every time someone was tagged on the bike. Alan never realized why Flynn looked perturbed every time the two argued about being Tron and not being Clu.

He headed towards the side rooms and entered the one on the left. The bed was smaller, but looked comfortable as Alan closed the door and made himself comfortable on the bedspread and mattress. He supposed the saving grace of the Grid was that even though there were clear indications of weather patterns, there was no discernible traces of temperature.

“Hey,” Lora's gentle voice buzzed through his front molars. He was glad it was a private conversation.

“Hey sweetheart,” Alan replied, feeling suddenly tired. His twenty-hours of marathon coding, followed by a short four hour nap, then more coding that he did not know how long, his sense of time was greatly off.

“Sorry to bother you before you nod off, but wanted to make sure you're all right,” Lora replied. “Jet just left. He looked a bit angry. I overheard him commenting on having Tron as a brother, but didn't hear anything else.”

“I...think I tried to make an excuse again,” Alan sighed, scrubbing his face with both of his hands. The movement made them ache and feel his sixty-two years of age. He was definitely getting too old for this.

The pause on the other side of the line made Alan almost hear a phantom 'Alan...' in Lora's voice. “I know...I know...” he filled in the silence.

“You're not a terrible father, Alan,” Lora replied, “you just need to understand, to be aware, that Jet...Jet still sees things differently than you.”

“Yeah, but seeing Tron, seeing _my_ program, like this...it makes me wish I did something, to go back, to change things. To pay more attention, to make sure he was doing all right. Maybe none of this would have happened, maybe-”

“Alan,” Lora cut in gently. “It's in the past. I'm reading the code here, I'm listening in, it's really clear from my end that Tron adores you. You're his Creator. He won't care if you told him you abandoned him or whatever, for so long. You're here now, that's what counts. You're here for him and you're helping him.”

“And I want to strangle Clu,” Alan groused.

She laughed, her warm chuckle echoing and buzzing his teeth to the point where even Alan's inner ear felt uncomfortable. “Tron's already wanting to protect you, that much I can read in his code, he doesn't want you to see him like this, but he knows that you'll also help him. Remember when Jet didn't want your help the first time he coded?”

“Yeah?”

“But then wanted to show you what he did afterwards and then you asked him about what he did to code his little mechanical program? You were patiently explaining to him the differences of his coding and how he ended up mashing both our styles together and what he needed to do to ensure those styles were compatible?”

“Yeah...”

“Think of it like this with Tron,” Lora replied, “he's like Jet, wanting to show you stuff, but also wanting some guidance. Tell him what you're doing, like how you distracted him when you were extracting the malware. But tell him so he understands and feels like he understands you better.”

“But I told him-”

“You dictated him. Yes you asked him, and he agreed, but help him understand,” she replied.

“All right...”

“Now get some sleep,” she verbally admonished him.

“Yes Lora-Prime,” he poked fun at her former user name. The soft click against his teeth told him Lora closed the line between them and he rolled over to his side to get more comfortable. He closed his eyes and was soon fast asleep, dreaming of gridbugs, of a young Sam and Jet racing around on their bikes like they were lightcycles.

 


	6. Rectifier

Alan groggily awakened at someone shaking him. He peered blearily over his shoulder to see Sam with a smile on his face.

“Sam?” Alan sat up, rubbing his eyes before reaching over to the nightstand. His hand encountered empty air and for a second Alan wondered where he put his glasses. That thought was quickly chased with a reminder that he was on The Grid.

“Your asking wake up call _and_ we found something that was embedded into the coding of the walls,” Sam held up a circular diskette. It reminded Alan of a MINI CD back when it was still wildly popular.

“Flynn?” He was more awake now.

“Not sure,” Sam's smile dimmed a little before handing him the diskette. “I can't decode it. Was thinking maybe you could help?”

“Ah, yeah, that whole Creator thing,” Alan replied. Truth be told, he thought it was a dream of sorts, his thoughts disjointed from the very vividly odd dreams.

“You okay, Alan? You still looked pretty tired,” Sam asked.

“I'm fine,” he replied, “just...did you ever think something you dreamed was so real, but then found it isn't?”

“Ah,” Sam nodded sagely, “you too, huh?”

Alan glanced at him, puzzled.

“Had the weirdest dream before I woke up. Didn't get much sleep after that. Told Quorra and she says that she remembered Dad having the same thing for the last twenty-something years he's been in here. Apparently she's not affected, but I think that might be a remnant of her ISO genes.”

“I'm starting to think that meditation cushion in the middle of the room isn't for show.” Alan eyed Sam dubiously and to his chagrin, the younger Flynn nodded in agreement.

“Makes sense if you think about it,” Sam's hands fidgeted a little, as if he was used to talking when he had something to distract his hands with. “We're Users, we're like gods to them and we're not supposed to be spending a large amount of time in their world. Maybe its The Grid's way of telling us to really not stay for long.”

“Then Flynn should have asked it to open a portal for him to go home,” Alan replied acerbically.

Sam chuckled. “Now you're sound like you just got out of a board meeting that you really hated.”

“It shows, doesn't it?” Alan replied before sighing and flipping the diskette in his hands over, studying it. “Where did you find this?”

“On the wall, where Dad kept his replicas of Bits,” Sam said, but before Alan could ask where the Bit that had been following them went in the last thirty-hours or so since they arrived at the sanctuary, the room was further illuminated by the blue icosohedronal shape of the Bit flying in.

“Yes!”

“What did I specifically tell you Bit,” Sam frowned at the data mote that flew rings around their heads.

“No!” the Bit said cheerfully.

“Bit,” Sam admonished, scolding it like a bad pet, “out. This is a bedroom. Let those who are inside sleep, especially Alan.”

“Yes! No!” the Bit contradicted itself before sheepishly leaving.

Sam sighed. “It found a home on Dad's mantle next to the replicas. I almost missed it until it started flying all over the place when I started to look at the code. I have no idea why it likes you.”

“Me neither,” Alan shrugged, “You coded it.”

“And it's like watching that puppy you tried to give to me back when I was a kid run away to enjoy Mr. Tompkins' company even more.”

Alan smiled a little, trying to hold in his laughter at the wounded look Sam gave him. “That was pretty funny, though.”

“Not for a kid,” Sam shot back.

“At least you found a dog that doesn't really take to me,” Alan replied, “Marv's got good sense.”

“Yeah,” Sam tapped one of his ears, “seems to hate Jet too even though he promised to walk him while we're in here, so there's that saving-ow, ow! Jet!”

Alan only gave Sam a look as he really did not know what Jet was doing to annoy Sam on a private line. “Boys...”

“Oh...that was just plain creepy, Alan. You and Auntie Lora both literally said that at the same time. You sure you didn't hear her?”

Alan only shook his head. It seemed his wife and son were keeping Sam company while he had been sleeping. He turned the diskette over in his hands. It looked rather ordinary, with no discernible way to open it or read it. Nothing seemed to call to him like the stunt he pulled on the platform. After a few minutes of studying it he shook his head and handed it back to Sam.

“I can't make heads or tails out of it,” he replied.

“Jet says whatever I'm holding looks rather encrypted. You think we should bring it back to the I/O port to be downloaded and examined outside of The Grid?”

“Don't know,” Alan gestured for Sam to give him the disc again, “Hmm...MINI Disc...but why would something like this be inside a computer system. It's technically a mode of transport if you will. You either copy things to it or copy them off of it.” He held the disc up again. “You show this to Tron yet?”

“He scanned it, but says that it comes back with errors that he says usually Users have,” Sam replied, “not sure what he means by that.”

“Tron wasn't designed to scan Users,” Alan replied, “to him we're probably lines of error messages, but registering as non-threats since it's part of his core programming.”

“Oh,” Sam took the diskette back.

“Maybe he knows where in the city Flynn might have left some kind of old tech to read something like this?”

“Like a disc within a disc, _Inception_.”

“Sure,” Alan threw up his hands a little, “whatever you kids are into these days.” He stood up, stretching again as Sam walked out. Covering a large yawn with the back of his hand, he headed out of the bedroom, feeling a little more refreshed, but still as if he did not get enough sleep. Maybe it was those dreams.

In the main area of the sanctuary, he saw Quorra sitting by the digital fireplace, tinkering with her baton. Tron was still outside, though he saw that his program had re-activated his masking subroutine to cover the scars cross his chest. The one across his face was still very visible, but it did not look like it dropped aqua-blue datashards. Alan supposed it was the same subroutine running through those scars. Tron became more visibly alert at his appearance, sitting up from where he was by the corner of the balcony, next to the pool. Alan noted that his program's coloration seemed brighter, back to its old soft-white hue with orange edging.

“Sam, Alan-One,” Quorra greeted as she looked up. “Any luck?”

“Nope,” Sam replied as he gestured towards her baton, “how did the new codes work?”

“Haven't been able to test it against any gridbugs, but it seems to be stable.”

“I made a code to hopefully focus the baton's energy output for better cutting ability. The shielding on that gridbug leader was giving us a lot of problems,” Sam explained and Alan nodded.

He rounded the chairs around the fireplace and headed back out towards the balcony. “Tron,” he greeted his program.

“You look more energized, Alan-One,” his program smiled slightly.

“How are you feeling?”

“Better,” his program replied, “my circuits are two microns less lethargic than before and I detected no threats within the last six hours since your sleep cycle. I have been syncing my datapacks with my discs and the firewalls have been holding well.”

“Good to hear,” Alan replied, “and wanted to also ask if you remember if Flynn left any old technology around from the beginning days of the Grid?”

“Like his lightcycle?” Tron asked. “I believe that was impounded and derezzed by Clu before he went out to the the sanctuary.”

“Damn, if we find Dad, he is definitely _not_ going to be happy to hear that,” Sam's voice came from behind and Alan turned to see both he and Quorra approach.

“Old technology that has not been salvaged would have been once found in sector Lambda of the City, but if the fragments serve me correct, they were all moved to Purgos. Clu did not want any reminder of Flynn lying about.”

“Purgos,” Quorra frowned, “that's...”

“The original settlement of Argon City before the new city was created next to it. Purgos is where many of Clu's initial invasion force came from when he came to subjugate Argon and the rest of the Tri-Cities,” Tron replied, “it was one of the last bastions of the resistance since it was on the edges of The Grid before the Sea of Simulation.”

“Tri-Cities?” Sam asked.

“Argon, Bismuth, and Gallium Cities,” Quorra replied, “the ISOs knew of those cities and there were those that fled to them during the Purge, but since it was on the edges of the known Grid and the only transportation we had across the Outlands was by light rail, escaping to them was a rare feat.”

“Dad really didn't mention any of that and I did hear a program at the End of Line club mention something about a growing resistance, but I thought it was within the City,” Sam commented.

“Argon was known to be an experimental transportation hub created by Flynn to test out modes of transportation when he was creating The Grid. He uploaded a few programs to help with the maintenance. Bismuth was an aquifer and energy source testing ground and also to see how a light rail system may work in favor transporting energy between Argon and Bismuth. Gallium was known to be a resource hub, where materials would be created in aiding programs. It was mostly industrial and also served as a test facility for energy conduits. Any and all improvements made in those three cities were then coded into the City,” Tron explained.

“What about this Arjia you mentioned?” Alan asked and Quorra looked at him sharply. “ISO City?” he guessed.

“Arjia was located within the confines of the City, but considered an spiritual haven for ISOs and Basics that wished for peace,” Quorra said quietly, “it was one of the first places, if not _the_ first place destroyed by Clu right after he attacked Flynn.” Alan noted she specifically refused to meet Tron's startled look. His eyes shifted back and forth between the two of them before he realized Quorra more than likely witnessed part of the fight between Clu and Tron.

“Anon didn't make it, did he?” Tron asked.

“No,” Quorra shook her head, “he stopped Abraxas, but he managed to get me to safety when Flynn found me...”

“He followed his programming and directive,” Tron replied, “the ISOs were not to be harmed and were kept safe.”

“...Yes,” Quorra replied.

“Was he...?”

“Derezzed. Took out Clu's Regulator too.”

“The fact that Clu actually made one...” Tron shook his head in frustration.

“Anon was a program?” Sam asked, placing a comforting hand on Quorra's back.

“System monitor created by Flynn,” Tron replied, “one of the very last and youngest based on his compile date.” A sad smile appeared on his face. “I normally handle each system monitor's intake and orientation. Installing modules that they would need, helping upgrade subroutines if they served in certain sectors. Most of the time, Flynn would insert coded upgrades for the monitors, giving them certain privileges. Clu and I would tweak their frequencies so that if we needed to do an emergency override to activate the wireless, we would be able to have near-instant communication with all the sys-mons in certain sectors.”

“How many were there?”

Tron looked up at Alan. “Hundreds. But they were all of the same code, all Flynn's creations like everything on The Grid.” His smile turned bitter, “It also made Clu's coup that much easier and made my job that much harder.” He looked at Quorra, “I'm glad that Anon protected you to the end.”

“I am too,” she nodded solemnly.

“Abraxas? That a virus?”

“You heard of it?” Quorra looked up at Alan.

“It was one of the very first viruses discovered on a networked computer system,” Alan frowned as he cast his memory far back. 1993 was interesting as DOS machines were still being used to boot up an OS, mainly Windows-based machines and command lines still needed to be typed to run an executed file. Networking was still only internal and even then a very slow speeds due to the fiber and cabling it took to even connect to two computers. The virus was not so widespread and only spread by floppy discs for the most part. “Infected both executable and command files through the DOSshell command. The only way to purge the virus was to reformat the whole drive.”

“Sounded similar to Abraxas we had here,” Quorra replied. “He was a former ISO named Jalen. Clu somehow corrupted his programming, breaking through the shielding we had, and turned him into a virus that infected everything he touched with corrupting malware. He killed Radia, the spiritual leader of the ISOs and Clu destroyed the city in retaliation.”

“Ariadne,” Tron murmured, cutting through Quorra's narrative.

“Excuse me?”

“Clu had Ariadne's disc when I stopped her after she became a gridbug-ISO hybrid of sorts,” he looked pensive.

Based on what Alan knew, he thought Quorra would have protested that the ISOs were not related to the gridbugs, but the lack of challenge from her made him glance over to see her with the same pensive expression. “It...” she started hesitantly, “it could explain how he was able to infect Jalen...turn him into Abraxas...”

“How does a Systems Administrator like Clu even create viruses? I thought he was only able to re-purpose, not create,” Sam asked as he absently rubbed Quorra's back.

“Subroutines,” Tron replied, “pathogenic subroutines. Flynn allowed the programs he created to evolve with learning modules which in turn are subroutines. Before the ISOs and even after them, your father was vested in the creation of better programs, programs that could multitask, but continue with their primary core function. Whether that core function improved after so many cycles was yet unknown.”

“So...just a tweak of a code on a disc or something?”

“Yes.”

“Geez...” Sam shook his head, sounding a little amazed and horrified. “Explains the Rectifier, what he was able to do with all those captured programs...” Both Quorra and Tron looked pensive and Alan wondered what each was thinking. Both survived in very unique circumstances of Clu's purge and domination of the system. But each witnessed their own horrors, each knew in some way how far Clu went.

Alan cleared his throat, cutting through the silence that fell. “So we go to Purgos then, see if we can find something that can read this MINI disc that Flynn left behind.”

“Getting to Purgos will not be easy,” Tron seemed relieved that they were talking about other things and extended his hand out, palm facing upwards. A three dimensional holographic map popped up in his hand, spreading out in an elongated pentagonal map. There were sharp jagged edges, data points that indicated borders and text written on there.

Alan saw that many of the jagged edges were labeled Outlands and Sea of Simulation. There were a few data points listed with do not enters and warnings that he didn't quite catch. A bright beacon in lovingly render of three dimensions dominated the map – the City. It covered majority of the left-hand side of the map. A winking beacon to the southwest of it indicated their current location, almost to the far edges. There were hundreds of warnings and errors riddling the area surrounding Flynn's sanctuary.

“What are the warnings?”

“Unstable parts of The Grid. Partitions for cracks that could trap a program forever in a loop, even one as powerful as Clu. Sections where infestations of gridbugs, worms, and strange codes were known to come from and so forth. The City and all other Cities were protected by an endless pit of fragmentation surrounding it from all sides.

“That's the Sea?” Sam pointed towards a location that only listed as Sea of Simulation. It hugged the northwest quadrant of the map and extended as a vast array of lines that cut through the middle of the map itself.

“Yes,” Tron lifted his fingers and placed a soft-white index somewhere off of the map beyond the Sea. “The I/O port where you entered from is here.”

“Directly north of everything.” Sam murmured.

“So we can't fly or take the light runner directly over?”

“The Tri-Cities are here,” Tron pointed towards the farthest edges of the map, all the way to the right. Alan noted that the Sea of Simulation buffered each individual 'island' of sorts, and two thin lines connected each of the cities. Argon seemed to be the one at the farthest edge, with the Sea of Simulation backing one side while the other was the vast space only labeled as the Outlands. “Argon is the gateway to reach Bismuth and Gallium, but you can only enter it from the Sea or by light rail.”

“It looks like the Outlands may circle the southern edges of the map so we can theoretically drive, right?”

Tron looked gravely at Sam. “Flynn, nor myself have ever traversed the whole of the Outlands. We simply do not know what lurks out here if we are not careful. There are pockets and cracks in the Outlands that Flynn once said he was going to take a look from the outside to try to repair, but I do not know if he was successful or not.”

“Lora, Roy, the two of you got that?” Alan called out, hoping one of the two was listening.

“Yeah,” Roy's voice buzzed his right molars. “I'm checking right now.” Not even a few seconds passed before Roy's voice buzzed again. “Tron's right, Alan. I don't think Flynn even got close to looking at the Outlands. The coding's all messed up from out here. I mean, I can try doing some defragmentation, but I don't know what's that going to do to the stability of The Grid itself.”

Alan frowned. He glanced at his program who seemed to have taken the one-sided conversation with some patience. “Flynn never got a chance to look at it.”

Tron nodded. “The safest route is through the City then. By light rail, it is less suspect than by the Sea.”

“Why?”

“As Rinzler, I may have been Clu's top enforcer, but there were others who felt that Clu's way was the right way. The Black Guards were already causing havoc and the administration of The Grid was delegated to other programs created for that sole purpose,” Tron tone was simple and to the point and Quora nodded in agreement.

“We don't know how many cycles have really passed in here even though the time dilation is currently in sync with ENCOM's offline servers. The disc we kept The Grid on put it into sleep mode, so for all we know, only the barest of processing power was in use and therefore we aren't able to figure out how much time passed in here versus the two years outside since Sam entered The Grid,” Quorra said.

“So what you're both saying is that there is a chance that The Grid is currently in the middle of falling into chaos, or that maybe no one knows Clu's dead yet?” Sam asked.

Quorra nodded and Tron rubbed his chin. “The fragments I have during that time period don't say much, but I vaguely remember Jarvis, Clu's intelligence officer and chief administrator wondering about the Rectifier. My guess is Clu didn't tell him everything and kept that one under heavily encrypted subroutines until he was ready.”

“Either way, we'll have to proceed carefully,” Alan murmured, placing his hands on his hips as he stared at nothing in particular. “We'll have to assume that they've kept the checkpoints into the City and the Black Guard are still monitoring those checkpoints.” He rubbed his chin, unknowingly mimicking his program's gesture as he thought. “Tron, where do the checkpoint data go? To you? To Clu's ship?”

“Through the central security hub,” Tron replied, “then forwarded to Clu or central control depending on importance. I think some came to me, but for the most part, I waited on Clu's orders.”

“Micromanaging at its best,” Sam muttered. “Great.”

“Can you get us into the central security hub?” He looked at his program who nodded.

“I can,” Tron replied, “my security subroutines are optimal.”

“Hopefully we can find a way to erase our presence in the security feeds, or alter them to the point where we can pass through to Argon then Purgos without anyone none the wiser.”

“It'll also give us a good lay of the land,” Sam agreed.

“Then its settled, Quorra, Sam, take one more look around, make sure we have everything we need,” Alan said, “we'll meet down by the garage in fifteen minutes.”

“Got it,” Sam left as did Quorra, leaving Alan alone with Tron.

He looked at his program. “Are you...all right?”

“I never knew what happened to Anon.” Tron gestured for the two of them to head back in and towards the elevator. “It was...it is good to know at least he was one of the few system monitors to not be corrupted by Clu in the end, even if he did give his life for his directive.”

Alan stopped Tron with a gentle touch of his arm, making his program look at him. “Tron, I also mean if you're going to be all right with this? With us going into the City, with programs probably looking at you like Rinzler or even Tron, maybe even putting two and two together. Judging by Quorra's reaction-”

“Most programs think Tron died during the beginning of Clu's rebellion,” Tron smiled sadly, “and those that stepped up in his place all tried to take the name of Tron, but they were just called Renegades.”

This was new.

Alan never heard of this and his surprise showed as Tron's sad smile was affirmed with a small nod of his head. “I am not ready to tell that part of the story yet.” His hand absently brushed against his chest, deceptively whole.

“The malware?”

“Related,” Tron replied.

“All right,” even though Alan was intensely curious about other programs taking on Tron's name after his supposed death, he knew not to press. It had only been mere hours since Tron blurted out the whole story of the beginnings of The Grid to Clu's coup. He could not ask more of his program until Tron was ready. He was only able to figure out where the memory of Ophelia's deresolution was just by pinpointing code lines each time Tron mentioned Ophelia.

He gently guided his program to the elevator and the two of them headed down. As they stepped off, Alan saw Bit zooming around the garage, the light runner idly sitting unlit. The sound of the elevator ascending then descending made him turn to see Sam and Quorra arrive. Sam's backpack looked a little bulkier as he dumped it into the middle seat in the back.

“I brought a few of Dad's relics and Quorra's copy of Jules Verne's anthology,” Sam replied, “don't want gridbugs getting to it or any enterprising program that ends up wandering the Outlands.” They all got into the runner as Quorra started it up. As she pulled out, Alan leaned forward.

“Wait,” he got out and knelt down onto the ground and extended his hand out, touching a mote of light that sprung up on the edges of the entry way to the garage and the rocky ground that made up the Outlands. A hard-light keyboard sprung into place and Alan typed in a few lines before the keyboard disappeared. Immediately a bluish hue sprung up around the sanctuary and disappeared just as fast.

Alan stood up and the corner of his lips quirked up in a small smile as he climbed back into the runner. His smile disappeared at the astonished look on Tron's face while Quorra looked as in awe as she did back on the platform and Sam had a roguish smile on his face.

“How do you find those points?”

“I...just do?” Alan wasn't sure how he managed to find the access points.

“You're a Creator of this Grid,” Tron did not hide his astonishment.

Alan cleared his throat roughly, feeling embarrassed again. He did not want to talk about why he was able to see certain points, manipulate parts of The Grid. It made him decidedly uncomfortable and set thoughts upon himself that he did not want to think or even consider.

“Oh...a security lock on the sanctuary,” Jet's voice buzzed in a slight teasing tone and Alan immediately frowned, staring towards the direction of the portal.

“Jet,” he warned, “I don't care how talented of a computer engineer you think you are nor that you work for Homeland Security, don't you even think of trying to hack the algorithm I encoded into Flynn's sanctuary.”

“All right, all right,” Jet's voice returned, “sheesh Dad.”

Quorra and Sam laughed lightly as she accelerated away from the sanctuary. Alan glanced over to see Tron with a mild look on his face.

“Jet's a talented programmer, but he's got his mother's flare for the technical and creative,” Alan shook his head a little, “also works for Homeland Security as a white hat hacker and helps maintain various firewalls and security functions.”

“Yeah and he could be making a ton more money if he joined ENCOM's back-end technology group,” Sam called out.

“I _like_ having government access, Sam,” Jet's voice buzzed. “Who gets to say that they helped prevent the United States government from crashing day after day.”

“Boys,” Alan gave an arched look at the back of Sam's head.

“I know, I know, keeping the peace,” Sam replied with a laugh, “but seriously Jet, you should have come in here.”

“No thanks,” Jet replied, “I like my body to _not_ be digitized into ones and zeroes. Gotta keep the fairer sex happy, you know.”

Alan sighed as he continued to hear them bicker. He glanced over to Tron to see his program with a slightly amused expression, clearly enjoying the one-sided conversation courtesy of Sam. It was good to see that his program was slowly healing, both mental and physical scars. He settled himself into the seat some more as they headed towards the shining lights of the City.

* * *

As the glow of the City drew closer and closer, Tron felt his passive sensors ping back with data and information. He made to lean forward to adjust to the information, but stopped his movement as he realized he was in a light runner instead of a lightcycle. He instead straightened. “Quorra,” he addressed the former ISO, having come to a tentative truce with her after the gridbug attack. “Once you enter, take the central street down to the heart of the security feed.”

“Down the center?”

“Yes,” he reached out with his right hand and touched his illuminated index, thumb, and middle finger, the small square plate in the middle of the car. It immediately lit up with its current datafeed. With his left hand spinning the completed masking subroutine coding he had been working on since they left the sanctuary, he fed it into the light runner's systems, letting it sit on top of SamFlynn's coding. He noted that the coding was very similar to Flynn's own, but there were slight differences. Like any other program that was inserted onto The Grid, Tron had overwrite privileges and knew he could insert it into the coding of the light runner itself, but he supposed the action would not reflect well with the younger Flynn.

Users were oddly protective of their own coding work when it came to their selves and the objects they rezzed with them like light runners or cycles. It took Flynn a while to come around, Tron repeatedly reminding him that he was brought to The Grid as an independent security program, and needed to do what he needed to do ensure the safety of all occupants.

The light runner immediately dimmed, but the power output stayed the same.

“What-”

“The masking subroutine, right?” Alan asked and Tron nodded as he leaned back, task done.

“It will pass by unnoticed by Basics and ISOs. However, it will not stand up to a full scan by any of the Black Guards or Admin system monitors,” Tron replied as Quorra took the main central street into the heart of the City.

“But I thought...” Quorra started but shook her head, “never mind.”

Tron glanced at the back of her seat, mildly curious. He did not know many of the ISOs, having only interacted mostly with Ophelia, Giles, and Zuse for the most part. He knew of Radia, Jalen, and Quorra, but left most of their training to become co-system administrators to Clu. In hindsight, it was probably one of the worse things he did – leaving them to Clu when he should have known Clu would have sabotaged it in any way shape or form. But he always had a feeling Quorra knew more than she let on, but how much, was still a mystery to him.

He pushed the process to the side for another time as he applied a subtle masking routine to himself and activated his helmet with a command line. The bullet-shaped helmet wrapped itself around him and he darkened the opacity to full. A movement out of the corner of his eye made him glance over to see Alan-One frowning at him and he shook his head.

“They know my face and my symbol,” he could hear his own voice being distorted to sound more Basic and flanged in the masking subroutine he was running. “Until we know what is happening, it is a risk I do not want to take for your sake.”

“Should we...” his Creator made to lift his own disc from his mount and Tron shook his head.

“All of you should be able to pass as Basics, high-end ones, but Basics nonetheless. I ask that you do not do anything that would expose you as a User for now,” Tron said as he quietly observed their surroundings. His passive sensors were picking up a myriad of information, and the situation was not registering as well as he thought it would be.

The Grid was still functioning, the programs doing what they were assigned to do or were on break, but it seemed like some of the Black Guards were acting rather erratically. He wondered if with the destruction of Clu, the rectification that some went through were perhaps corrupting their processes.

“Whoa, what's-”

Tron peered beyond SamFlynn's shoulder to see them approaching what looked like several Black Guards who were wandering around. It was clear they were in the middle of rounding up several programs but stopped. Some were beating their staffs on the ground, while others were holding their heads in their hands. One was even repeatedly smashing its head into the barrier field. The programs that had been rounded up were warily backing away.

“Keep driving,” he ordered, “there is nothing we can do at the moment. My guess is that whatever rectification Clu might have put them through is being corrupted now that there is no central processor to control them.”

“But we should-”

“Tron's correct, we can't help them,” Quorra replied tightly as she accelerated a little faster to get them past the crowd of curious programs all bewildered by what was happening. The guards that were not affected were trying to help the ones who were acting erratically.

“But...”

Quorra only shook her head against SamFlynn's protest. Tron glanced over to Alan-One to see him with a pensive expression on his face, absently rubbing his chin. His Creator looked lost in his thoughts and Tron was too polite to inquire. A couple of blocks passed before the familiar building of the central security hub. It was once his building from where he was able to network into The Grid's whole feeds, receiving incoming data for him to distribute to his team and to the Guards. Nicknamed Tron Tower, he was surprised to see it still standing after Clu's rebellion. But judging by the sickly yellow line running through its once soft-white coloration, he supposed Clu repurposed it; just like he repurposed everything else. As Rinzler, he vaguely remember fragments of time spent in it, but nothing had jogged his memory of Tron then – or at least not enough for him to break his programming.

“There's an alleyway, two blocks down. Turn to your right and then make an immediate right,” he said. Quorra did as he said and slowed the runner down. She pulled over to the side and stopped.

“So what's next?” SamFlynn asked.

“You're not going to like the next part,” Tron replied, “we'll have to assume central security is still occupied by programs loyal to Clu or are still rectified by Clu. Even if they could be glitching, we can't take the chance.”

He held out his left palm, rotating a small glowing cube the size of his fingertip. He normally did not give his coding any shells, knowing that his fellow programs could see it, but it seemed from his cycles of observation, Users preferred some kind of visual and tactile sensation to whatever they touched. “A masking subroutine that will at least alter your armor's appearance,” He held it up to SamFlynn.

“Uh...” The User looked like he had no idea what to do with it.

“Disc,” Quorra made a motion for SamFlynn to unmount his disc.

“Uh, what's wrong with my armor?”

“It marks you as a stray program who was sent to the Games,” Tron replied.

“Oh,” SamFlynn gingerly plucked the cuboid, almost as if he was afraid he was going to crush it in between his fingers and followed Quorra's movement to place it in the middle. To Tron's surprise, it worked as the cuboid immediately collapsed into the ring of the disc, sending a brief green glow before returning to normal. He never really had the need to give Flynn any subroutines and had not expect his coding to blend with a User's disc. SamFlynn holstered his disc once more and the change was instantaneous.

“Whoa...” the young User looked surprised, “that's...hey wait...uh...”

Tron watched as the subroutine finished installing itself onto SamFlynn's disc. It turned his armor into something similar to a Black Guard's, but had the same orange coloration that marked him as a Black Guard.

“I think I'm getting the gist of the plan,” Alan-One commented quietly next to Tron and he glanced over to see his Creator staring contemplatively at SamFlynn. “You and Sam are going to escort Quorra and myself in as prisoners?”

“It's the only way we can arrive at the central terminal without being questioned. All prisoners that Clu wishes to personally question are processed through the central terminal.”

“How come I didn't go through that?”

“Clu already had plans to use you to lure Flynn out,” Tron replied in a matter-of-fact tone.

SamFlynn only shook his head as Tron nodded towards Quorra. “Flynn would have eventually ordered her back to be processed through central terminal once he achieved his foothold outside of The Grid. I do not remember if that order was processed through, but we cannot take the chance.”

“How do we know that once we're at the central terminal and I guess start looking for information, the whole building won't be on alert?”

“All security functions for the building also run through central terminal. We can disable it with no alerts. Efficiency for optimal functionality,” Tron replied.

“All right, we got Quorra covered, what about Alan?” SamFlynn asked.

“A program that knows the location of Kevin Flynn and has been harboring ISOs,” Alan-One suddenly replied.

Tron knew his opaque helmet covered his expression, but even he was surprised at his Creator's sudden and frank input. It was rather clever and subversive and Tron tilted his head a little as he stared at Alan-One. His Creator had a far sharper mind than he first realized and he was a little warmed that this was _his_ Creator.

“Um...all right then,” Sam glanced at Quorra who nodded her assent before glancing at Tron. “So...we good?”

“Helmet, program,” Tron tapped his own bullet-shaped helmet. At the same time, he ran another layer of a masking subroutine that changed the coloration of his lights to orange. Both SamFlynn and Quorra flinched at the change, but they recovered quickly and started to climb out of the runner. The User flicked on his helmet and made a small adjustment to the back of his head for it to turn mostly opaque. It only covered up to his mouth, but it was enough to obscure his features so that he was not recognizable.

“I'm going to quietly voice my objection that I am really not comfortable with you looking like...that, Tron,” SamFlynn muttered as he elongated one of his batons to the length of the staffs that some of the Black Guards had.

Tron ignored the younger Flynn's attempt to talk with him and headed over to the side of the building. He immediately sought out the panel that was hidden by layers of encryption only known to the Black Guards that worked at the Central Security and it lit up at his touch. Pressing his palm against it, it slid open and the melodious voice of The Grid echoed quietly in the alleyway. “Welcome back, Rinzler.”

He ignored the voice and turned to the others. “Step where I step. Security cameras.” Not even waiting for them to agree, he headed down the entryway of the garage. They passed by numerous rezzed lighttanks, cycles, and even lightjets. His passive sensors pinged the location of the watching cameras until he finally found a spot where he gestured for Quorra and Alan-One to stand before them.

“No cuffs?” SamFlynn asked. Tron only glanced at him and the User shrugged in response. “I suppose your reputation is all you need...”

Tron reached out and firmly gripped the back of Quorra's left elbow, earning a sharp look before she turned back. He did not need to say anything for her to move as Sam did the same to Alan-One. Tron immediately could see that Sam was uneasy and nervous about gripping Alan-One's elbow in the same manner and gestured back towards them with two fingers for Sam to let go of Alan-One's elbow. He pointed briefly to Sam's staff and the User nodded once.

They entered the nearby elevator and Tron reached out to press the button that would take them straight to the central terminal level. Tron ran a quick runtime routine to smooth out his processes a little, feeling his code flutter in nervousness. The firewalls were holding the programming at bay, he could feel it, but applying the subroutines on himself was tasking him and making him even more nervous that somehow the firewalls would fail. He could not process that thought further – he needed to believe in his Creator's programming, needed to trust in it.

They reached the central terminal level and the doors opened. Tron stepped out along with Quorra and was followed by Sam guiding Alan-One. He could not tell who the guard on the 'duty' station was, but that was not what alarmed him.

The Admin of the City was here; not at central control as he hoped. It would made it harder than he expected to lock down the central terminal floor.

“Ah! Rinzler! Welcome back,” the program's jovial tone was anything but. Long tinged with the madness of the upgraded power disc, Pavel was corrupted by its many cycles of use. The upgraded disc, a power subroutine, was supposedly destroyed cycles ago, an experimental weapon created by the energy-output program Shaw, but a version seemed to have found a home in Pavel's disc.

The fragments of memories Tron had of Rinzler did not provide any context of when Pavel became the Administrator of the City, but Tron supposed Clu wanted Pavel watched and reined in. He did remember the circumstances that precluded Pavel's reassignment from General Tesler to the City, but everything else after that was just fragments. He wondered if Clu expected Rinzler to keep an eye on Pavel. It seemed prudent, he supposed, or another one of Clu's ways to test him, test the corrupted programming that turned him, besides the endless games in the arena.

Tron ignored Pavel's factious tone and guided Quorra up to the processing desk. He thought he felt a ghost of a query ping his processes, but could not pinpoint the source. However, it made him more alert and wary as he discreetly looked around. Ten additional guards manned the circular room, each tending to their own station.

He recognized the Guard on duty at the processing desk. Phoebus was the program's name and he had a bond-program named Thalen who worked at the arena. Tron only remembered Phoebus as one of the rare helpful Guards who did not fanatically follow Clu's ideals – at least from what Tron knew. But what happened after the Purge, Tron did not know. As Rinzler, he could only surmise that Phoebus was utilized by Clu and himself on missions and nothing else.

“Well, well, well, what have we here Rinzler old boy?” Pavel stepped away from a console and walked towards them. He waved an absent hand at the others who stood by their stations. “Spot inspection, you see? Came down from central control. Gotta keep the Black Guards on their toes and make sure things are running smoothly for Clu!”

“Sir,” Phoebus addressed Tron, seemingly ignoring Pavel's bluster, “would you like me to process these two programs?”

For once, in probably the whole of his runtime, Tron was thankful that Rinzler operated in the vacuum of near silence and using only gestures to communicate his intent. He tilted his head in the manner he remembered through the fragments and the Black Guard moved away from his station.

However, it did not stop Pavel from circling around SamFlynn and Alan-One, staring curiously at them.

“There's something off...” Pavel started, as he stared shrewdly at the two, “there's something off about you...even you, Guard. What is your function number?”

“TK-421, bring your prisoner here,” Phoebus suddenly barked out.

“Sir,” SamFlynn tried to do his best impression of following orders, but even Tron could hear the nervous tremor. As fast as he was thankful for Rinzler's silence, he also cursed it. He could not do anything to explain or excuse the User's nervousness. A discreet glance at Phoebus as Tron moved to a nearby station and placed his palm on one of the pads to self-process Quorra in, made him wonder if the program also heard the same thing.

“TK...” Pavel stopped his pacing and watched as SamFlynn and Alan-One approached the station. “I have not read the roster rolls of this program's name and function-”

“New recruit, sir,” Phoebus replied, “I may remind you of His Excellency's new initiative. We must ensure that the process holds.”

“That was fourteen cycles ago,” Pavel threw his hands up. “That initiative should have already begun! Why are we-”

“Sir! Sector 412 is currently reporting three of the Guards that were assigned there are glitching! It's happening again!”

The idea came almost at the same time it must have hit SamFlynn as he suddenly took two steps back and suddenly knelt down onto the ground, cradling his head. “Ah! Get it out! Get it out!” SamFlynn did his best impression of what they passed by while driving down the central street of a glitching guard.

He saw Alan-One and Quorra both react in alarm, both of their faces morphing into concern. It was so genuine that for a moment that Tron thought something was affecting the User before, he saw something flash in Alan-One's eyes.

“Thalia! Reeve! Lock the doors! We cannot let this glitch spread to the other levels! Nico, Turing, Gates, now!” Phoebus suddenly called out.

To Tron's astonishment, the whole room came alive with two programs he recognized as two of his former team suddenly type furiously at opposite ends of the circular room. The doors on all four sides came crashing down and locked into place. Three more of the Black Guards moved from their stations, discs drawn and activated, but they did not advance on them and instead, pointed them at the five others who were caught off guard by their sudden movement. Even SamFlynn stopped moving on the ground and instead was staring, quite bewildered at the sudden turn of events.

“What's...going on?” Pavel turned on the spot, shocked at what just happened.

“Sir, per your orders many cycles ago, we have now apprehended the malicious program named Pavel and his conspirators for threatening to overthrow the stability and safety of The Grid by conspiring with the system administrator Clu,” Phoebus turned to Tron.

“What?!” Pavel rocked back on his heels as he looked around, “You can't be serious! His Excellency Clu would never order my arrest! I am as loyal of a program to him as there ever will be!”

“You are correct, sir,” Phoebus replied, “as you have just proven your loyalty to Clu, sir. This is why you are now under arrest. By conspiring with the corrupted systems administrator Clu to overthrow the lawful Creator Kevin Flynn, you and your cohorts have threatened the stability of The Grid. Our directive as Guards are to keep the system operational stable. We were created to work with the security program Tron to ensure that. The genocide of the programs known as Isomorphic Algorithms, re-purposing of sympathetic programs, along with their deresolution broke the operation of the system and created an unstable Grid.”

“Tron,” Pavel sneered, “is dead!”

“If he was, why would we be following his orders?” Phoebus asked with a pointed look at Pavel.

Tron lifted his hand from the panel he was digging through with his security clearance. Phoebus stood in front of him, staring at Pavel. His disc was not drawn, but the Guard looked rather at ease and not worried. The confidence in the program's posture along with the fact that both Quorra and Alan-One were standing near them made Tron re-evaluate his options.

“You think-” Pavel flung a hand out, “Rinzler!”

Tron reached behind him and unhooked his disc from its mount as he could feel something trying to worm its way through the firewall his Creator built. It felt uncomfortable and he did not like it.

“I'm ordering you in Clu's name to detain the Black Guard Phoebus and kill his conspirators-”

He activated his disc; the feeling growing even more uncomfortable as he could feel it pressing on the firewalls. It felt like a codeworm, but worse. He ran a reverse trace and frowned behind his helmet as he lifted his disc.

Pavel smiled victoriously-

He knew he would pay for it later, but there was no other way. Tron _moved_. In the barest fraction of a nano, he held his disc against the back of Pavel's neck while simultaneously plucking the program's own disc from its mount.

Tron did not need to see Pavel's face to know the smile had frozen in place. He released almost all of his masking subroutines, leaving only the two that covered the malware on his chest and face and retracted his helmet.

“I...thought you died...”

“I got better,” he said in a simple voice.

“T-Tron...” Pavel's voice quavered as he gingerly turned his head. “Ah...I, uh, ah...”

“Looking for this?” he held up the program's disc as he took a step back and deactivated his own disc and holstered it. He immediately removed the power subroutine in the shape of a disc from its housing and tossed the now unaltered disc to Phoebus who fumbled as he caught it. Tron could sense the program was rather surprised at his appearance. He supposed Phoebus might have been expecting him to stay as Rinzler.

“That's-”

“Not yours,” Tron held the semi-transparent disc out towards Alan-One. “Alan-One, if you will. It is a weapon that must be destroyed-”

“No!” Pavel suddenly made to lunge, but Tron, still overclocking his movements, whipped his disc from its mount and activated it with his left hand, pointing it straight at Pavel who froze in place.

“Alan-One,” he calmly called again as he dared Pavel to move.

The tug on the other end of the small disc made him let go of the malicious piece of programming and he watched Pavel's eyes track the movement of the subroutine. “Phoebus,” he called out, bringing Pavel's gaze towards him once more. The program glared at him. “Lock his disc and bind him.”

“Sir,” Phoebus replied and a few nano later, the Guard approached him with Pavel's disc pre-emptively locked and set it back onto the program's mount. At the same time, he swiftly pulled the program's hands back and bound him with cuffs. As soon as that was done, Tron deactivated his disc and set it back onto his mount.

“Sir-” Phoebus started, staring at him from behind his dark helmet. “It is good to see you're back, sir...”

“Oh please,” Pavel muttered. “You simpering fool.”

“Mute him, for now,” Tron nodded his assent and Phoebus tapped a few buttons onto the lock before a gag materialized over Pavel's mouth. Phoebus marched him away to where one of the programs, Nico if Tron remembered correctly, was setting up a small barrier cage. The other programs that held the five at bay were gesturing for their comrades to surrender their discs for locking before being escorted into the small temporary makeshift cell.

“Wow...definitely not the way I expected things to go.” SamFlynn picked himself up from the floor and brushed himself down.

“Tron,” his Creator's hand on his shoulder made him turn to see Alan-One staring at him with some concern. “You're overclocking your system. Remember what we talked about?”

“Understood,” Tron let his processes return to normal and immediately felt himself sway a little from the severe energy drain. He did not realize he stumbled until two strong arms propped him up and he turned to see that it was both Alan-One and Phoebus holding him.

“Sir!” Phoebus's voice sounded heavily distorted, as if it was coming from a long end of a tunnel. “User! Bottom drawer, there is a large cylindrical object with dark blue liquid inside! Toss it to me!”

Tron barely heard the the sounds of something being opened and closed, his audio filters filling with static before the coolness of a liquid was raised to his lips. He instinctively reached for it, recognizing it as unrefined energy and drank it hungrily. In short gulps, he could feel his processes returning to normal, the static that filled his audio filters fading away and his strength returning. He blinked, once, twice, before the world came back into focus and he saw that he was looking up, not at, Alan-One and Phoebus' worried faces. Somewhere along the line, the Guard removed his helmet and his plain, unimaginative features were staring back.

“Sir?” Phoebus spoke up.

“I'm fine,” Tron made to stand up, but Alan-One's firm hand kept him rooted to the ground. “I'm-”

“No, you're going to stay there for now. Your energy levels are slowly evening out and I don't want to run the risk of the spiking effect again. Bad strain on your firewalls, Tron,” Alan-One looked at him pointedly.

“As you wish,” Tron felt a disconcerted, but obeyed his Creator's request. Apparently seeing that he was staying put, Phoebus stood up, a small smile on his face.

“Good to see you back to normal, sir,” the program started, but gestured towards the left side of his face, “well, mostly normal.”

“Scarring, nothing to worry about,” the subroutine that Tron ran through the gaping malware on his face masked it only so much that it looked like a bad scar. “How did you figure it out?” A ping on his passive sensors told Tron that the other programs were being herded into the same makeshift cell on the far side of the circular room. Both Quorra and Sam had moved over to watch them with some curiosity. He could tell the other programs that were apparent allies were also equally curious about them, but dutifully executed their orders.

“You forgot then,” Phoebus' smile dimmed a little before he nodded mostly to himself. “You gave me emergency override and wireless privileges back during the whole Ariadne incident. Since you and Clu are the only two who have such privileges, it allowed me to at least tap into the wireless frequency coding to monitor things.”

Tron quickly reviewed the memory file and nodded. “I did...” He smiled crookedly, “I suppose it was good that I did not remember to take those privileges back after everything.”

“Yes sir,” Phoebus nodded, “When Clu overthrew the Creator Kevin Flynn there were those among the Guards who served him willingly, those who refused and were rectified, and programs like myself who thought we could perhaps fight from the inside.”

Tron gestured with his chin towards his two former teammates, “Reeve? Thalia?”

“It took many cycles for myself and a couple of others to slowly break through Clu's rectification. Nico was my team's expert disc modifier. He was the one who told me what I needed to do during the times I was able to access the emergency frequency and subtly alter his code without Clu knowing.”

“That was dangerous,” Tron frowned. “The risk-”

“Was great, yes,” Phoebus agreed, “but worth it. However, with you, sir, when you were...”

“Rinzler.”

“...Rinzler,” Phoebus reluctantly said, “I only used it to monitor any potential change.”

“Ah...the 'ghost' I felt right before we came up here...”

“Yes, sir,” Phoebus' smile returned, “I could tell the difference, sir.” He looked up at Alan-One. “I presume, I have you to thank User, for returning the Grid's protector to his current state?”

“Phoebus,” Tron could not miss the opportunity to tease the program that apparently served and followed him so faithfully for so many cycles, even when he was Rinzler. “That's my Creator, Alan-One.”

Phoebus' smile became stilted as his eyes widened in shock. “Oh my User...you're...”

It was very hard to suppress the command line to laugh, but he managed to under a couple of layers of encryption, only allowing his smile to grow a little wider as the Guard's mouth opened and closed several times. “Phoebus,” he lifted a hand and placed it on the program's forearm, sending a gently command of calmness through the monitor's systems. “Now's not the time to short circuit.”

“Y-Yes sir,” Phoebus stuttered, but it seemed the command of calmness seemed to have smooth out some of his lines a little. “Wow...I mean...wow...the legendary Alan-One... I mean...Flynn is my Creator, Flynn is all of the programs' Creator, but you, sir, have also been spoken from time to time. I remember escorting Flynn one time when he was talking about you with Tron here, sir.”

“Oh really? Phoebus was it?” Alan-One stood up and gestured for the program to follow him a little bit away. Tron watched them go, thankful that somehow Alan-One knew he wished for a little bit of privacy. He stayed where he was, mindful of Alan-One's orders to rest as he watched SamFlynn approach the Guards, having secured the five others along with Pavel. He could see their prisoners glaring at all of them through the semi-transparent orange barriers.

Quorra, however, had moved away from SamFlynn and pressed her hand in the same spot Tron used to do his initial search. However, instead, of doing a subtle trace, a directory of sorts appeared in front of her and Tron watched her study the information that scrolled through. Apparently it also caught Alan-One and Phoebus' attention as the two of them broke from their brief conversation and moved towards Quorra.

“Hey Tron,” SamFlynn called out, “are you sure they can be trusted?”

Tron slowly pushed himself up from the floor, feeling that his processes evened out as much as possible and walked over to where the User stood, arms crossed as he stared at the five that were aligned with Phoebus. They all retracted their helmets, staring at him with expectant eyes that also showed relief. They stood tall, proud, and he could sense that they were waiting for his orders, even his word. A condemnation, or a praise, it did not matter to them – they were proud Guards.

He nodded sharply at them. “Yes,” he did not need to scan them to know that they were loyal to him.

All of the Guards straightened at his word. Two of them immediately purged the orange lights that marked them as Black Guards, leaving them with their original soft-white. The other three kept their orange coloration, but they still stood proudly.

“Nico, sir,” one of the white-hued programs saluted, “Turing and I were waiting for Phoebus' signal.”

Tron stepped forward and stretched out his hand, shaking theirs. “Good to meet you.”

“Gates,” Nico gestured to the program that was a little shorter than the rest of them, “he was unfortunately rectified after being picked up as a stray. And I believe you remember-”

“Thalia, Reeve,” Tron stepped towards his two former teammates.

“Tron,” Thalia's voice was a little more flanged and garbled than he remembered. “Your lines?” She was never one to mince her words, direct and to the point.

“Firewall,” he explained, “how are the three of you holding up?”

“It has its moments,” Reeve was very easy-going, but even his words were a little garbled.

“SamFlynn?” Tron turned and Sam stepped forward, his hands loose by his sides. “Do you think...?”

“Firewall to see if we can separate the coding? Yeah, let's see...I'm not that great at that aspect, but I can hit Alan or Jet up to give me a few pointers,” Sam gestured for the three to follow him as he headed to where Alan-One and Phoebus were, apparently still engaged in conversation. Phoebus apparently noticed that his fellow Guards changed their coloration and did the same to himself. Tron smiled a little at the sight of the Guard's lights. It felt good to have allies again.

“Nico, Turing,” Tron gestured for the two programs to follow him and they headed to where Quorra was. “Quorra,” he called out and the former ISO looked up from the map she was studying.

“What's the situation?” he half-turned to the two programs, but also addressed Quorra at the same time.

“Looks like no one on the floors have noticed anything amiss,” Quorra replied.

“The wireless isn't on and we're isolated from the rest of the floors in case of any attacks,” Nico replied. “I'm Nico.”

“Turing.”

“Quorra,” she shook hands with them.

“You're not scanning as an ISO...”

Quorra raised her eyebrow, apparently surprised. For a moment, Tron did not quite understand why she would have considered it rude, but he vaguely remembered Flynn making some sort of comment and same expression when one of the security monitors he created asked something similar. “I am not one anymore,” Quorra replied, “I went into the User's world and came back as one.”

“We will update our databases then,” Turing replied, “we ask your apology for the directness of our query, but we must ensure if you were an ISO you be kept safe per the Creator's wishes.”

“I thought...”

“Our directive is to keep the system operational and stable. The Creator declared ISOs not to be a threat. The System Administrator thought otherwise. There was conflict with our directive.”

“Interpretations?”

“Yes,” Turing replied, “and such conflict with our directive led to destabilization of the system and jeopardize our ability to execute our directive.”

“But there are still others like Pavel who disagree with your interpretation of your directive,” Quorra pointed out.

“Pavel is not a Guard. He was willingly reprogrammed from a data entry program. As for the others,” Turing nodded again, “this is why Tron here was the independent system monitor installed by the Creator who could make most of the decisions to guide our directives.”

“I see,” Quorra replied with a curious tilt of her head. “Thank you, Turing. That was rather informative.”

“As you wish, UserQuorra,” Turing nodded politely before turning to him. “Sir, there are other programs who have the same directive as ourselves. The sight of the beacon lighting up again have set a broadcast alert out to the rest of The Grid that Users have returned.”

“Some programs, especially the Guards that have been repurposed by Clu, have started to glitch a couple of cycles ago,” Phoebus took up the narrative as he and Alan-One walked over. Tron glanced back to see SamFlynn absently fiddling with Gates' disc, but seemed to be listening to them as he sat on the ground. “In Nico's and my studying of the repurposing code, we think it is because there is no central command line being constantly fed from the System Administrator. The lack of one has caused the re-purposing to break down.”

“But how?” Sam spoke up sounding a little distracted, “the loss of a SysAdmin shouldn't affect programs that drastically, should it?”

“If it's programs all with the same type of coding it can affect it,” Alan replied, “it's like reformatting parts. You wipe one section out and replace it with another, but then you tie it into the central area so the original parts don't realize its been replaced and technically everything should function as normal.”

“Makes sense,” Sam replied, “like a virus replicating itself?”

“Probably,” Alan-One replied.

“Do you think Clu's lieutenants have figured it out?” Tron asked.

“Lieutenants? Clu had others running parts of The Grid?” Sam sounded surprised as he looked up from his work.

“Makes sense,” Quorra replied from where she leaned against the console. Her arms were crossed across her chest. “There were those whom Clu ordered to lead the Purge.”

“Pavel is one,” Tron replied with a thumb back towards the program who was attempting to skewer him with just a look. “Hence the power subroutine.”

“We do not know,” Phoebus shook his head, “we can run queries.”

“Do so,” Tron replied, “but under several encryption layers. We will also need to erase traces of our approach from the Outlands if you will.”

“Yes sir,” Phoebus nodded, “if I may ask why sir?”

“Hang on,” Tron shook his head before walking over to the makeshift cell. He touched a section of the cell and a panel sprung up. Tron turned the opacity to full and added an audio filter layer on top of it. Closing out of the panel he walked back.

“Apologies sir,” Phoebus looked disconcerted, “I should have-”

“What's done is done,” Tron waved away his loyal program's apology, “you could not have known.”

“What...?”

“Audio filter and opacity cover,” Tron replied, “we cannot take any chances that Pavel may have a separate wireless frequency that was encoded into him after all these cycles. The emergency wireless was known to every single Guard, myself, and Clu. I do not if there was a separate frequency Clu communicated to me as Rinzler, but I do remember it was wireless.”

“Oh,” SamFlynn had a look of chagrin.

“We'll also need clean passage into Purgos through the lightrail,” Tron replied.

“Purgos? But...sir...Dyson, he's still-”

“I am well aware of that,” Tron replied, “but we will need it. We have important business in Purgos.”

“Understood,” Phoebus did not further voice his protest. “I will see to arrangements. I will also clear a path to the armory two levels down, sir.”

“Good,” Tron replied before he looked at Quorra for a moment. “Phoebus, can you also clear a path to central storage? I believe Quorra may find a few things of use in there.”

“Yes sir, right away sir,” Phoebus replied before gesturing to Nico and Turing. “Nico, Turing, please escort Quorra to central storage.”

“Sir,” both Nico and Turing abruptly turned their lights back to orange as Quorra stared shrewdly at Tron. He returned her silent look with a brief nod of his head and she turned away, following the two programs as one of the doors to the circular room unlocked.

Tron walked over to another station and brought up a floor plan of the building. It showed little dots and motes of light moving throughout the floors. Most of them were orange. He saw the three motes of light, one white, two white-orange, denoting Quorra, Nico, and Turing headed down the two levels to central storage. The lights of orange that were in the area suddenly moved off into a different direction; courtesy of Phoebus' work.

Tron smiled briefly in response before studying the other lights. He heard footsteps behind him and turned his head slightly to see Alan-One approaching. “Alan-One,” he greeted his Creator.

“How are you feeling?”

“Better,” he replied, “my processes have evened out for the most part.”

“Good,” Alan-One replied, “how long will it be for Phoebus' task?”

“Several hours at least. We are safe in here, but we'll need to move Pavel and the other programs to the cell levels before can consider leaving. The audio filter and opacity cover will only do so much.” He touched the hard-light projection showing the cell levels. “The current output of the Guards show none of them glitching which means either they are all loyal to Clu or they have not yet been affected by the glitching happening in other programs.”

“Could there be a few who are like Thalia, Gates, and Reeve?” Alan-One gestured to where Sam was in the middle of re-mounting Gates' disc and the the program's lines changed from all orange to white-orange bisection. The program looked rather happy and began to thank Sam profusely.

“Possibly,” Tron replied before an idea came to him. “Possibly,” he repeated, “it may work to our favor. The emergency wireless can be used within a certain radius. If the knowledge of Clu's demise is announced-”

“We could see how the reception is on a small-scale. That way we can also anticipate what we may encounter if we go to Argon and Purgos. Either way, with the glitching going on, knowledge of Clu's demise may get out sooner rather than later. In this case, we can at least feel out a program's intent.”

“Yes,” Tron replied, “the Guards do not have subversive programming built into them. Their directives are clear and their intent is built into their programming.”

“Phoebus?” Alan-One asked.

“My own...I think this is the correct use of a User phrase from Flynn, 'happy accident' if I am correct?”

Alan-One smiled a little and Tron felt happy.

“I hope he didn't use that in a different context,” Alan-One commented and Tron stared at him, puzzled. He was not sure of what his Creator meant. “Never mind. Forget I said that.”

“As you wish,” Tron replied, “I gave Phoebus emergency override protocols long ago and in the aftermath, did not take them back. It was close to the chaos of Clu overthrowing Flynn so the process might have been pushed to a secondary need and then buried under encryption in subsequent cycles.”

“Well, it is good that Phoebus is loyal to you, loyal to his interpretation of his directive,” Alan-One replied. “So what's next?”

“I suggest waiting until Quorra has returned from central storage before enacting the protocols.”

“How long will she be there?”

“Central storage was where Clu kept the discs of ISOs and programs he's found an interest in,” Tron replied, “I hoped Quorra could find a measure of peace there and perhaps some closure.”

“So there was a trophy room...” Alan-One's smile became a solemn frown.

“Excuse me?”

“Trophy room,” his Creator gestured with his hands. “It's a User-term for someone that takes items and displays it in a way that they think enhances their reputation or they think are important to them. Sometimes not necessarily a bad thing, if those items are won in fair contest or well-deserved, but in this case, it's a bad connotation.”

“I see...”

“Quorra said she heard rumors since the Purge that Clu kept a room with the discs of the fallen ISO leaders-”

“Ophelia...”

“Maybe her too,” his Creator stared at him.

Tron met that look with one of his own. “I do not know...I...don't think I ever visited central storage, even before and after. I only knew of it as a reference to discs that Clu kept of other programs and if he found an interest, a Guard was to bring it there. That was it.”

His Creator nodded before gesturing to the three blips of light that were two levels below them. “Come on, it looks like she'll be there for a while.”

“Alan-One?”

“Are there anymore of those makeshift cell things? We can set up a privacy barrier of sorts and continue to work on removing the malware,” his Creator said and Tron frowned.

“Alan-One, I mean no disrespect, but do you think it is a good time to do that? We only secured this floor-”

“And you said so yourself that this floor is isolated from the others. Pavel and the other programs will not escape. Quorra may be a while before she returns. If we are going to Purgos or if you wish to enact your plan, you will need more of your strength and processing power back; not hampered by the malware.”

Tron could not argue with the logic of his Creator and reluctantly nodded. He left his station, moving over towards where he left the half-drank cylinder of unrefined energy and picked it up. _Phoebus_ , he sent over the wireless-ghost he had with the program and saw him perk up from where he was currently altering the footage. It seemed he startled the program with the usage of the wireless-ghost.

_Sir?_

_Privacy screen, please_.

Phoebus immediately rummaged through a small drawer by the station before tossing him a cube the size of his hand. Tron caught it with a brief nod of his head as the program turned back to continue his work. He would have to encrypt the wireless-ghost layer soon enough as he knew with the activation of the actual emergency wireless in the building, it would override the ghost communique.

“After you, Alan-One,” he gestured for his Creator to lead the way.

 


	7. Adagio for Alan-One

By Alan's estimates, four hours passed, nearing the fifth when Quorra finally returned from central storage. Alan watched, with some interest, as she walked in. She looked subdued, holding a disc that was definitely not her own. She looked around for a second before Sam approached her, having spent the last few hours working on refining the firewall for Reeve, Thalia, and Gates. He knew Sam could have approached him to ask how he coded a firewall for Tron, but Alan also knew Sam had a bit of a coder's pride in him and more than likely asked Jet for some help instead of seeking it from Alan.

He was not offended to say the least, but proud of the young man. In the two years since he took over ENCOM, the company's stock was on the rise once more and Richard Mackey was ousted. It was clear ENCOM was entering another golden age, with mobile and innovative OS technology that was, in hindsight, Grid-influenced. Quorra helped with some of that, ENCOM branching into medical technology to add to their portfolio and the shareholders were very enthusiastic in their approval in the last corporate meeting.

It was successful enough that no one would question the disappearance of their new CEO and the CTO, having felt they deserved some rest and relaxation. This enabled them to enter The Grid with their own timeframe, free to explore at their own leisure. Though Alan currently did not feel the leisure part of it. It was clear The Grid suffered in the absence of Flynn, the absence of their Creator. Alan did not know much about the glitches and his gentle probing of Phoebus did not reveal much, only that it started a couple of days ago, just when they fired up The Grid from the disc it had been copied and stored onto by Sam after he left the first time. With The Grid in sleep mode, everything seemed to have frozen in place, only starting up after it received power.

Alan did not know what the long-term consequences were of a computer system without a central processor – perhaps akin to an OS without the necessary code holding it together – Kevin Flynn. Flynn did say that The Grid changed, grew, and spontaneously developed programs of its own volition. He could only hope that perhaps it would stay together instead of fragmenting into pieces. But what Alan knew for sure was that at least he could help in his own way – at least keep the security and anti-virus running smoothly so there was some kind of continuity.

He glanced at his program.

Tron sat next to him on the ground, in hibernation mode with his eyes closed to conserve and rebuild the energy levels once more. The giant cylinder of unrefined energy sat next to him was completely drained. It was faster this time, to peel the rest of the malware from Tron's chest cavity and finally layer on new and improved coding. His program rarely went into hibernation mode, but with the massive amount of malware Alan was able to extract and replace, it required his program to hibernate for a bit – thus gave the illusion of sleeping.

However, Alan knew that his program was not truly asleep. Even in hibernation mode, an anti-virus program like Tron would always have his passive sensors out on alert to wake him quickly should a threat arise.

Alan scrubbed his own face, feeling more tired than he felt in a very long time. “I'm getting too old for this,” he muttered mostly to himself as he yawned and stretched his arms out. He felt the old bones and cartilage pop as he rotated his neck this way and that.

Shifting himself to try to get some circulation into his own legs, he leaned back against one of the unused panels in the area he commandeered to operate on Tron. He rotated his shoulders as he was about to settle against it before a thought occurred to him. Pulling his disc from his mount, he flicked it on and looked through it.

The disc was fascinating. A simple piece of technology that existed in the computer world to store memory, even use it for alterations, weapons, a host of things. There was no fear of memory loss. Even with that feature, he was still fascinated by how his own technological code was transferred from reality to this world. The minor alterations and small codes that gave him almost a second life, a feeling that he could be invincible and be God at the same time.

It was a heady feeling and one he was acutely aware of. He reached out with a finger and flicked through the settings, his instincts guiding him to an image of his own head that rotated around in a projection. He could understand why Flynn loved the Grid now, could understand why he did the things he did. And could also understand the terrible, terrible and horrifying temptation that laid before him – rotating as the simplistic image of his own head. The technological ability to create, store, alter little bits and pieces of code. Even add-on features like installing a simple app to a smartphone or even to an OS. All with this little disc.

Already, it proved it with the simple alteration of his “code” his DNA so to speak in the digital world. His lack of glasses and his perfect vision was indicative of that. His heart was beating steady and he had not needed to take his high-blood pressure medication since they entered over two days ago. Alan knew he could further alter and tweak his settings, but that was where he knew temptation met Godhood so to speak. Those digital ones and zeroes that eliminated his health problems in The Grid would more than likely not leave with him once he exited The Grid.

Quorra was the only one of them who could make such alterations and have it permanently altered once she exited. It was because of her unique status as a triple-helix entity, a manifestation of The Grid given life in the outside world by Flynn. Sam proved that any changes, even physical ones, could not alter regular humans who entered and exited The Grid freely. He claimed to have received a small wound that bled when he was first on the Grid, but when he exited, no such wound existed on himself.

But Alan now understood why Flynn came to him two days before he disappeared all those years ago. Quorra and ISOs were the key. They were the key to changing science, medicine, religion, anything and everything. The Grid itself was also key to changing society as a whole. Now, the real possibility of living in utopia, a paradise free from disease and illness was a reality. A terminal patient could be instantly saved, instantly cured of their disease by entering The Grid, and having some minor alterations done on their disc. The only caveat was that they could never leave as it was cosmetic.

But if someone like Flynn found that The Grid was paradise before, what was to say that others would just want to live in The Grid forever? They would grow old, live a full long life, and perhaps even die of old age and natural causes. The part of Alan that was fascinated by such things wanted to test, explore, experiment. But the cynical, world-weary part cautioned strongly against it. _Look where it got Flynn_ , it whispered to him and it tempered most of Alan's own enthusiasm.

There was also Tron to consider.

Alan glanced over at his program for a moment before looking back at his own rotating image. The Grid needed to be fixed before anything could be done. He could not even consider playing God until he ensured The Grid was stabilized, was secure, safe, and that maybe, just maybe, Flynn was still somehow alive.

He fiddled his with his disc, the rotating image disappearing to reveal several lines of code. Alan set the disc on the floor and began to type, his fingers touching a hard-light keyboard that popped up with his motion. There were clear dangers on The Grid, and he knew that they would need every advantage they could get. If he could help in any way, even for Tron's sake, he would. He finished typing and deactivated the imagery before remounting his disc. Immediately, he could feel the surface changes and smiled tightly to himself. It was not much, but maybe, just maybe, it could be of some help in the near future.

He yawned again, feeling tired.

“Alan,” Lora's voice was quiet and gentle, but buzzed two of his bottom teeth. “You all right?”

“Yeah,” he replied quietly as he watched the coming and goings of the programs in central security. Quorra was still talking with Sam, though she looked troubled. He wondered who's disc she found and what she discovered. “Tired,” he replied, “haven't marathon coded in ages.”

“Don't push yourself too hard, love,” Lora chided, “I know you want to fix everything at once, but you still have to look out for yourself.”

“I know,” Alan replied, “but...I feel...”

“Responsible for Tron, I know,” Lora's voice was warm, “I do too in a way. It will take time, Alan. Just like Jet, just like Sam. You can fix Tron as quick as you can, but he's already shown that he's more...human if you want to look at it, than just a basic program.”

Alan smiled wistfully. “Yeah...” Truth be told, he felt a sense of pride at his program, for surviving for so long against the harshest of odds. For garnering the loyalty of programs like Phoebus, and others.

“Be patient with him, Alan,” Lora said quietly, “I can already tell from his actions, his lines of code, that he wants your approval, but he also doesn't want to worry you. To him, you're probably more than just a father or Creator. You're his validation.”

“I know...” Alan replied, “and it worries me.” He sighed quietly. “The morality, all of it, it just feels...”

“Wrong,” Lora replied and he nodded, even though he knew he could not see her.

“Yeah,” he agreed, “it's different in here. They don't have the burdens of our world and it feels like you can make a difference in here. They're happy to execute their programming and not stray from it. There's a sentience in The Grid, maybe because we programmed them. The only sign of difference so far is the interpretation, especially one as broad as the Guards have. But the ISOs?” He fell silent, his thoughts a whirl.

Lora was also silent and Alan did not blame her. They both understood why Flynn did the things he did. Why he disappeared for long stretches now. The Grid was intoxicating when one truly discovered its capabilities. It might have gone to Flynn's head in ways. Clu's corruption and regime was also a harsh reality and it was clear they were still dealing with the aftermath.

“Alan?” Sam's voice startled him out of his thoughts and he looked up to see the younger man approach. Quorra was a few steps behind, though it seemed like she was uncharacteristically hesitant in approaching them. Her gaze was rooted to the hibernating Tron and Alan wondered once again what she found in the central archives.

“What's up?” Alan slowly stood up, mindful of his hip and back.

“Tron good to go? Phoebus says he was able to mask any trace of our presence where we touched The Grid. He also gave us subroutines to enable us to pass into Argon City.”

“Good,” Alan nodded as he reached down and gently shook his program's shoulder. The effect was immediate as Tron's lights lit up in their soft white glow, bisected by thin orange lines.

“Online,” his program murmured as he looked up and scrambled to his feet at their presence. “Alan-One, SamFlynn,” he greeted. Alan smiled slightly at the less flanging of his program's voice. His program also noticed the change as he lifted his hands and arms up, flexing them before lowering them.

“You definitely sound a lot better, Tron,” Sam smiled slightly.

“Feel a lot better too,” his program agreed.

“Still not one-hundred percent, gotta tackle the malware near your main processors,” Alan indicated the facial area, “but the ones that have been hampering most of your functions and protocols have been removed. Just remember, no self-repairs until I get rid of all of the malware.”

“Understood,” Tron nodded once. “SamFlynn, we are ready to go?”

“Just about,” Sam replied, “Phoebus says he was able to scrub, or at least mask most of our presence that we made on The Grid. He also gave us subroutines for us to pass through to Argon, though he says he's not sure if they'll hold up to a deep scan?”

“Standard protocol,” Tron replied, “most masking subroutines are not designed to hold up to an administrator-level system monitor's deep scans. A system monitor has basic functions to write masking subroutines to ensure the safety of The Grid, but they do not have privileges to override any admin's scans. It allows for an administrative-level system monitor like myself or Clu to ensure that everything is optimal and running smoothly. Each of the cities has an admin system monitor.”

Sam frowned and Alan realized what the younger Flynn was going to ask.

“The malware, right?” he cut in before Sam could ask his question.

“Correct,” Tron nodded before gesturing to himself, “Apologies, SamFlynn. I did not realize you were unfamiliar with certain processes. I would have written such protocols for us like I had to change your appearance as a Guard, but such internal coding would have traces of the malware's signature on it and would have been easily detectable.”

“But what about-?” Sam gestured to himself.

“Designed to purge from your disc once you reverted or after a period of inactivity or usage,” Tron replied, “I did not anticipate Pavel detecting the anomaly so fast.”

“Oh,” Sam nodded, “that's why he was already saying something was off.”

“Yes,” Tron frowned. “It is troubling though as it makes me wonder if the Rinzler programming I received when I was rectified was hardcoded into all admin system monitors to ensure detection or tracing by all.”

Alan nodded absently as he rubbed his lip. “It wouldn't surprise me, Tron,” he said and saw his program glance at him, surprised. “Well,” he looked at the two, “it's a good way to share responsibilities and like your wireless, enable faster communication. Think about the fact that Clu wants to make sure any sign of resistance is stamped out quickly. Instead of relaying it over wireless or what have you, he just tweaks a code in one of you and it spreads to the others so that you all know the threat and can react to it in each of your cities or sectors before it can spread.”

“Like a systemic virus,” Tron's voice was very flat and Alan grimaced but nodded.

“Unfortunately, yes,” he wanted to reach out to comfort his program, but somehow knew the gesture would not be appreciated nor would it be effective.

“Well, once the malware's out of you, it should be fine, right?” Sam asked, sounding a optimistic.

“Let's hope,” Alan quickly agreed. Privately, he had doubts based on his own words. But he also did not want to worry the others. There was a chance that even with the malware gone, if the code was built into Tron, it would take everything short of a complete reformatting of his security program down to the bare bones code in order to get the trace out. He cleared his throat lightly. “So, what's the plan?”

“Phoebus recommends we turn this building into a beacon,” Sam replied.

“Bold,” Tron murmured his approval, “dangerous, but bold.”

“Thank you, sir.” Alan turned to see the other program approach, a slight smile of pride on his face at the praise.

“What would that do?” Alan was a little confused.

“A beacon would be a signal to all programs of a new administrator of The Grid. In essence, a slow reformatting of code and signal to spread the news of Clu's demise.” Tron crossed his arms across his chest in thought. “It would spread the glitching of the Guard's programming faster, since this is the system monitor hub. It wouldn't be as fast as if we took it to central control, but fast enough. It would also reveal those who have been unwillingly rectified versus those who have gone willingly.”

“Wouldn't that contribute to the destabilization of The Grid? I mean, I'm not quite on the up and up about how the system monitors and all are linked, but it's a bit dangerous...”

The corner of Tron's lips twitched up in a sardonic smile. “Precisely,” he gestured with a chin towards Phoebus.

“Ah,” Sam looked a little embarrassed, but covered nicely.

“From what I understand,” Alan started thoughtfully, “this also makes this point, ground zero, so to speak, the hub point, of what other system monitors could perceive as a corruption of The Grid's processing and thus activate the need to restore it to a previous point.”

“Also why it is dangerous,” Tron agreed. “Phoebus, it is only you, Reeve, Thalia, Gates, Nico, and Turing. You may be isolated here, this may be the point of origin, but you would invite not only the Guards not loyal, but potentially gridbugs, worms, and unstable coding The Grid may not be prepared to deal with.”

“How is that any different than when Clu took over?”

“There is no Systems Administrator this time around,” Tron glanced at Sam who looked perturbed. “The purge of the ISOs and the rectification of the Guards created the same instability, but it was managed by the powers of the Systems Administrator to lessen the likelihood of the collapse of The Grid.”

Alan grimaced. Tron and Phoebus' words and plans definitively confirmed the instability of The Grid without someone like Clu. It made him wonder how much power did Flynn give Clu when he created him. In ways, it made sense, as Flynn knew he could not be in two places at once. But surely...

“Tron,” he spoke up quietly. “Before Clu, was there instability?”

Tron's gaze turned inward for a long moment and he knew his program was searching and sifting through his processes. “No,” he finally replied, “we were building then. Flynn imported a few programs like Shaddox who was a builder to help, but they were basics.”

Alan nodded absently. This confirmed what he knew and he made to push his glasses up his nose as he made his decision. However, as he touched his nose, he remembered he did not have his glasses and instead, awkwardly crossed his arms across his chest, mirroring his program's stance. He dared not look at anyone. “Lora,” he said quietly. “Prep the extraction files and thumbdrive. If this goes south, I want to ensure we at least save some of the programs here. Roy, did you finish the code?”

“No, not yet,” Roy Kleinberg, the second-oldest employee besides himself who was the only one left of the original ENCOM, replied. Roy was ousted soon after Flynn was declared dead. As soon as Sam became CEO, Alan hired Roy back with all of the years of back pay and seniority of being the second-oldest employee besides himself at ENCOM.

“Jet can help,” Alan replied.

“Dad-”

“Jet...this is what we talked about before we went in,” Alan shook his head, mindful that he knew the others, except for Sam and Quorra, were aware of his one-sided conversation.

“But Dad-”

“Jet,” he put a little bit of a warning tone in his voice.

“...Fine,” his son did not sound happy.

Task done, he refused to look at Sam and Quorra. He did not tell them about this contingency when he went into The Grid - having planned them only on his suspicions. Instead, he addressed Phoebus and Tron. “We suspected the lack of a SysAdmin might have started The Grid's degradation, so I put together some contingency plans in order to save The Grid. One was to extract uncorrupted programs and place them on a new Grid. The other was to reformat The Grid itself. Our hope is to find Flynn alive. With his powers as the Creator as you both aptly put it, maybe he would be able to stabilize The Grid. However, from what we've learned in our cycles here so far and with this plan to turn the central hub into a beacon, we may not be able to get to Flynn in time before The Grid potentially collapses due to instability.”

Alan bit his lip and grimaced. “I, apparently, have Creator capabilities,” he started reluctantly. “And from what we suspect, Creators can stabilize The Grid.”

“I don't get it, so what's the problem?” Sam asked. He did not look too happy at being left out of the loop.

Alan finally looked at Sam. “Flynn and I have very different coding styles. I start making changes to his code,” he gestured around them, “I may end up either hastening the de-stabilization of The Grid, or wiping out this one and creating something new. The programs here, everyone, except Tron, has your father's code. Because they're designed to interact with The Grid, they may turn hostile because my code would be different than theirs, they may be wiped out, they may even merge with the new one. Too many variables, too many unknowns.”

“But Tron-”

“Is independent of The Grid. He was explicitly created to be independent of The Grid. I start coding the stability, his code will be recognized as compatible and it may change The Grid itself. Tron might become hostile to Phoebus because it's a different code. Might not become hostile. May be the opposite as the Guards become hostile all over again even with their code changed. Because of the possibility of overlaid code that Clu repurposed for others in Tron, again, unknown variables and factors.”

“What about what you did on the I/O port platform and that security barrier around Dad's place?”

“Minor tweaks, changes to unformatted parts of The Grid. I didn't change Flynn's sanctuary at all, just added a layer of security. I don't know what will happen if I do it to a populated place like this place.”

Sam opened his mouth to voice another question before he closed it. Alan could see the moment where Sam put two and two together before his expression became very flat. His next words were cold and even startled Tron and Phoebus, both who stiffened in alarm. Alan preemptively held up a hand towards them, hoping they would not perceive any threats.

“You knew-”

“Suspected,” Alan cut in.

“You knew you had admin, Creator privileges?!”

“ _Suspected_ , Sam,” Alan emphasized. He knew his denial was not getting through to Sam, but he had to try. “I knew your Dad was doing something, but what it was, he never told me.”

“Did you know, back then, where Dad was when he was declared missing?”

“No,” Alan shook his head. “No. Even I didn't know. I searched Sam, I _searched_. Everywhere-”

“Except the arcade,” Sam sneered, “or did you search there and didn't see the skid marks of where the console was pushed away?! You gonna tell me that you didn't search there, Alan? Huh?”

“I didn't search the arcade,” Alan stared at the younger man. “Your father closed that place down six months after he became CEO of ENCOM. There was no need to search when he died. We all thought-”

“There was power running to the place when I got there. You said you got a page from there,” Sam countered glaring at him. “If he shut it down, why the hell was there power? You don't keep a place like that running if you claim to have shut it down and it should have been after he died-”

“Then he must have used an offshore account, a shell corporation to siphon money for power and for the phone line to be active,” Alan replied, “his Will-”

“Yeah, Dad's fucking Will,” Sam growled out.

“Did you ever look through it? Look at where all of the money and interest holdings were going towards?” At Sam's silence, Alan continued. “No? It might have been in there so get off of your high horse and don't accuse me that I didn't know where your father went when he disappeared.”

“You had the keys! You had the fucking pager! You suspected you were a Creator here-”

“And that's all I got!” Alan finally had enough as he roared back. “Just keys and a pager that I was told to keep on me at all times!” He shook his head as he glared at Sam in disgust. “Get your head out of your ass and realize that I only suspected because why the hell would my program, why would Tron, be so accepted here in a Grid that has wildly different programming constraints than what I code? Flynn must have tweaked his own coding to ensure some compatibility.”

“Oh, don't act like you've been hurt like I am feeling now, Alan Bradley,” Sam shook his head, his face a mask of disgust. “Don't play the victim here-”

“Don't you start with me, Sam-”

“You fucking knew. You had the pager first and then come to me to say you got a page from the arcade? You must have known. Your suspicions, as you claim them, to realize what the hell happened.”

Alan swallowed heavily. Sam did not know how close to the mark he was hitting. But how could he explain to him the hurt, the betrayal _he_ felt receiving that page? Instead, he set aside his feelings and gave Sam a cold look. “I don't have to explain myself to you.”

Apparently Sam had more of his father than his mother and in hindsight, Alan realized he was treating Sam like one of the junior board members instead of the surrogate son he helped raised. The younger man immediately took the statement as a threat and stepped forward.

“I don't think so-”

The sudden activation of a disc made everyone pause and stare at the hand that held the disc. Alan's gaze traveled to where Tron was stonily holding his disc aloft. “I think,” his program started softly and quietly, “both of you should take some time to yourself. The focus of your mission here was to find evidence that Flynn may be alive, is that not correct?”

Alan took a deep breath, centering himself as he nodded. Sam only jerked his head once, still angry. “Then let us take advantage of the situation and continue towards Purgos,” Tron replied, giving the two of them hard stares. It was eerie in a way to see his own youthful face produce such an expression and he briefly wondered if that was what looked like facing down the ENCOM board from time to time. Small wonder why ENCOM kept him around.

“You, Sam, and Quorra should go,” Alan sighed. He gestured vaguely towards Phoebus. “If this place becomes a beacon, it's going to need reinforcing. I can help add some security, but it'll take time.” He looked pointedly at Sam. “It's not merging with the code or altering it, but like a security layer at Flynn's sanctuary.” He silently added that it would finally confirm whether or not he had Creator privileges like he suspected.

Tron frowned. “But Alan-One-”

“Someone also needs to stay here and help reprogram those who were forcibly rectified by Clu. Maybe that'll help with the stability of The Grid since there is no SysAdmin,” he pointed out.

“We are happy and consider it a privilege to ensure your safety UserAlan-One,” Phoebus interjected before glancing at Tron whose frown deepened. It was clear his program did not like leaving him behind.

“Fine, its settled,” Sam said loudly before turning on his heel and stalking off. Alan watched him move towards the entrance, clearly wanting to be away from the place. He looked back at Tron and nodded, silently reassuring his program that he would be fine.

“I will be mindful, Alan-One,” Tron touched his own face briefly before deactivating his disc and gesturing for Quorra to precede him. They both walked over to Sam and the three disappeared through a door, leaving Alan alone in the central security. There was silence, not even a single buzz on the wireless speakers they used and Alan did not know what to make of what happened. It was the first time he confessed his own suspicions; even Lora did not know since they legally declared Flynn dead and his Will and Last Testament was read. He kept his own feelings about the whole matter to himself for a long time, focused on running the company, focused on Sam's well-being. Focused on everything except how he felt himself when Flynn went missing.

Alan pushed his thoughts aside and shook his head wordlessly. He did not want to deal with it at the moment and wished to distract himself. “All right,” he turned to Phoebus, “what do we do about Pavel and the others?”

 


	8. Old Friends

 

There was something soothing and rhythmic about the repetitive lights indicating their passage to Argon City. Tron watched it with a small bit of interest, most of his passive sensors focused on any potential threats that could enter the car he, Quorra, and SamFlynn sat in. They were the only ones in the car, not so unusual as Tron learned from the data feed he received from Phoebus that Argon City's repair programs were compliant and did not need other programs sent. It operated mostly independent of Clu's oversight, the command to build and ship most of the building materials for Clu's Rectifier going in one direction.

He pulled himself away from the rhythmic lights as he felt Quorra's presence press upon his immediate sensors and turned to see her staring down at him, a hesitant expression on her face. He had a passive process as to what she would be reluctant to talk about, but masked it under a subroutine. Further down towards the other end of the car SamFlynn's presence was still in the same spot he was in when they first entered and settled themselves. The younger Flynn was clearly still angry at Alan-One. Tron would freely admit he did not know what to process about the fight between the two other than he reminded him too painfully of the arguments between himself and Clu in the early days of The Grid. Except it seemed neither was inclined to back down while Tron was willing to compromise and work with Clu.

It was odd seeing two Users argued as he expected them to get along well. And it seemed that way between SamFlynn and Alan-One.

“I've learned to give Sam some space when he gets like this,” Quorra noticed his gaze. “Though I will admit I've never seen him and Alan fight. In fact, I've never seen Alan raise his voice ever in the two years I have known him. I guess...maybe this is what they mean by the expression – it's to be human...”

Tron knitted his brow, a little more than confused. However, he did not voice his query as the hesitancy re-appeared on Quorra's face. “I...owe you an apology, Tron,” the former ISO turned User started quietly, her hands clasped in front of her.

“What for?” Tron asked, curious.

She bit her lip before pulling the shoulder bag she carried with her. Rumaging through it, she pulled out a silver-grey looking disc. “This belonged to Ophelia,” she said quietly.

Tron found his gaze rooted to the silvery disc. It was in pristine condition, but he remembered the voxels of blue datashards spread all over it. The moment where he raised his disc – Rinzler raised his disc – and plunged it into her, derezzing her forever. He blinked, his audio filters decidedly muffled as he could remember her words. _“I know you're somewhere in there Tron, and I forgive you_.”

“I saw...” Quorra hesitated before taking the seat across the aisle from where he sat. She looked down before looking back up. “Ophelia was the wisest of us all. The first of us and our leader,” she started quietly as she held the disc in both of her upturned palms. “When she was Radia-”

“She was Radia?” Tron was surprised. He met Radia a few times, approved of her becoming co-systems administrator with Clu on Flynn's behest. But like all other ISOs, he could not scan her her code and she gave no indication she recognized him all those times except in polite greetings.

Quorra smiled sadly. “I understand now, why she adopted Radia as her name as I understand what happened when she was finally derezzed.” She rubbed her thumbs over the grooved edges of the disc, seemingly tracing the nicks and divots it had.

“She firewalled memories of your previous encounters with her. Radia was needed to become the spiritual leader of the ISOs, to become the co-systems administrator to help unify all under Flynn's vision of a better future. To her, Ophelia was someone she could not be, someone who could not become the leader of the ISOs and guide them. Ophelia was a learning program, learning to be a leader so Radia could lead. She did not discard Ophelia, but kept her memory files safe, secure. She drew upon Ophelia's knowledge to guide the ISOs. But when she was killed by Abraxas, by Jalen, she did not completely derezz. She reverted back to Ophelia, to try to guide the ISOs to safety, to sanctuary.”

“...And she was derezzed, by me,” Tron replied haltingly. He was unable to process why Ophelia decided to firewall a part of her and become Radia. But at the same time, he did not understand why he did not pick up on the signature of Radia to be the same as Ophelia. It puzzled him, but he supposed it was because he could not read any ISO signature. Even his message to Ophelia when the Black Guard were attempting to bomb a rally, was an incredible effort and unsustainable in the long run.

“I...served Ophelia and Radia for a very long time, Tron,” Quorra flicked a look at him before staring back down at her disc. “And did not think of why Ophelia discarded her name and changed it to Radia. But now...knowing more about Users, knowing more about Sam's world, being a User myself, I understand why...

“You gave her a masking subroutine, so she can be herself, to not feel the burdens and pressure of being our leader. She in turn passed it to all of us during the Purge, hoping it would help us. Clu used your gift to her,” Quorra frowned as she stared down at the silvery disc. She flipped it once in her hands, thumbs still tracing over the nicks and small indentations.

“...I know,” Tron replied softly. He remembered the moment Clu used it to gloat over his victory before her deresolution. “I am sorry...”

“I think...” Quorra absently rubbed the disc with her thumbs again. “I think she was trying to protect you...”

Tron looked up, meeting Quorra's gaze. Surprise flooded into his processes and he blinked. Maybe his audio filters were glitching. Quorra stared, hard, searching. He wondered if she was scanning him, if somehow, as a User now, she could see his code. Flynn never claimed to be able to do that, but Quorra was once an ISO turned User. ISOs were still unknown, their capabilities and processes masked behind their unusual shielding.

“Thank you,” she seemed to have found what she was looking for. “Thank you for trying to keep her safe; trying to give her a normal life. Thank you for sharing with her the ability to become who she truly was, to help lay down her burdens as our leader and accept her for what she could have been.”

“You gave her a masking subroutine, but Clu took it. You gave her hope, but Clu took it. You gave her compassion and Clu took it. She gave you her shielding, but Clu never took it,” Quorra smiled and Tron thought he saw water – tears as he remembered Flynn talking about them, even crying once – track down the side of her eyes. However, she did not scrub it away nor did she seem to notice them. In fact, they seemed to be growing as more tears tracked down her face. Tron was briefly alarmed at the quiet noise that escaped Quorra's mouth before she buried her face into her hands and Ophelia's disc. He glanced over to see if SamFlynn would move, but only received a look from the User along with a small shake of his head.

It was clear that SamFlynn knew what Quorra was going to talk to him about and more than likely was staying out of it. Tron turned back and tentatively reached out, placing a gentle hand on Quorra's shoulder like he saw Flynn do from time to time to comfort programs. He did not know if it would help Quorra, but based on what Flynn said and showed him, it was a way for Users to comfort each other. He was not a comforting program, but in a way, he remembered wanting, but unable to do the same to Ophelia in her last moments.

And somehow, he felt that this was right.

* * *

“Now arriving at Argon City,” the melodic voice of the train's runtime was followed by the indefinite slowing of the train that took them from the City to Argon. Tron pulled himself from the light hibernation he fell into in the nanocycles since Quorra's talk with him and gently roused the User sitting across from him with a shake of her shoulder.

Quorra came awake instantly, blinking sleep from her eyes as she sat up and adjusted the small bag she carried. She hastily wiped at her eyes, having cried herself to a deep sleep. Giving him a brief hesitant smile, she stood up and the two of them met up with Sam who was standing by the doors. The younger Flynn looked tired and Tron wondered if the User got any sleep since they left the City.

“Sam?” Apparently he and Quorra were of the same mind as she worriedly placed a hand on his shoulder.

SamFlynn yawned, stretching his arms. “Slept, but seriously...I'm really now thinking Dad's cushion for mediating isn't there for show...”

“Are you sure?” Quorra asked.

“Drank a couple of the Red Bulls, but damn, those dreams are sure freaky,” SamFlynn replied, covering up a yawn. “I'm fine...just...maybe should have meditated instead of sleeping, you know?”

“We can find a secured area if you wish to recover some energy, SamFlynn,” Tron pointed out as the train slowed to a stop and the doors opened.

He stepped out, the masking subroutine that Phoebus built automatically activating to mask his familiar lights and lines. Phoebus' subroutine gave him the wide spaced lines and lights of one of Flynn's programming. His own masking subroutine for his facial scars was overlaid with a large dried voxel of a scar, seemingly eliminating part of his jaw. Both Quorra and SamFlynn were in much simpler subroutines, SamFlynn with bits of lights coloring parts of his own circuitry to mimic a repair program and Quorra with ones that marked her as potential admin-level programming.

“Nah,” the User waved away his concern, “I'm good for now. I am really curious about Argon though. It's...something else.”

“That it is,” Tron agreed as he looked around, taking in Argon City after a long absence. His passive sensors pinged back with the necessary information. Structurally, the city did not change, nor did Tron expect it to after many cycles, but unlike the last time he was here, the city's circuits did not feel as active as before. In fact, it felt disconnected, the circuitry out of sync with what he felt back in the City. Information seemed to move sluggishly, and he glanced back at the train. It seemed that information was brought in by the trains, but slow to reach its destination.

Tron's curiosity was prickled enough that he wanted to follow the slow data pulse to the command center to see what could be the reason, but he halted that process. His priority was to enter Purgos and find a disc reader for the material Flynn left behind.

“What is it?” Quorra picked up on his movement.

“Data transfers are slower here than in the City,” he tilted his head at two programs who were walking away from them.

“Those two were on the train and they are scanning as having information packets for the command center. However, they do not seem to be in a hurry nor have activated transports to direct them to the command center,” he frowned. “Normally any program with information for a command center would rezz a lightcycle or find a way to expedite the process. This was before Clu's takeover and even during if protocols have not changed.”

“You're right, that is odd,” Quorra replied.

“You think it could be the glitching that's happening in the City?” Sam asked.

“No,” Tron shook his head as he gestured for them to walk to one of the terminals. He held his hand over one to download the latest map and datapoints. [ _This file already exists, overwrite?_ ] He pinged a negative at the query and the glow subsided. Tron quickly reviewed the file he had and saw that the download date of the latest datapack was the same as the date of his attempt to upgrade the file. “The maps haven't been updated since right before Argon City fell...” he murmured. He copied the map he had and packaged it up, turning it into a info packet before holding it up in his palm for the two Users to download.

“Data can't be that slow, can it?” Quorra looked alarmed, but reached for the info packet and pulled it into her hand. It disappeared just as quickly.

“How do you do that?” SamFlynn looked utterly confused.

“Data packet. Normally User eyes are not able to see it, but programs can through a different wireless frequency, but I've received such transfers time and time again that it's instinct for me to do it. Remember the subroutine you received when we entered central security?”

“Oh...oh...” Sam nodded slowly as realization dawned on him. “So...how come this is fast and you're saying data packets here are slow?”

“Maybe not slow, but maybe carefully vetted through and upgraded if necessary if I'm right,” Tron pursed his lips, an unsettling process overcoming him. “I can't be too sure, but we'll need to check a Guard's disc before we can head to Purgos.”

“Why? How does it make our trip to Purgos different?” Sam asked as Tron moved away from the data download station and headed deeper into the city.

“It doesn't, but if we end up alerting the guards, they will be harder to deal with,” Tron replied before grabbing his baton and rezzing it into a lightcycle. He glanced at the other two who stood, surprised at his movement. “I know of a secure location we could plan our movements.”

“All right,” Sam took his baton and rezzed it into existence before Quorra did the same.

He gunned the engine and sped off, Sam and Quorra following behind him. They merged into traffic and Tron was a little relieved to find the movements of the programs of the city were not as unusually sluggish as what he witnessed on the train platform. A click in his ear told him one of the two Users managed to activate a comm line to his lightcycle. Though he knew he should be surprised as it was usually him that initiated the connection, he supposed it was because they were Users and Users operated much differently – wildly unpredictable and innovative at times.

“So what's with the Guards then?” It was SamFlynn who activated the line.

“Clu had years to perfect his repurposing,” Tron replied, “to what it was before you first left the Grid SamFlynn. It was not as automated as when you first saw it. When Clu first initiated the Purge and takeover of The Grid, the soldiers he had with him are the most loyal. As he spread through the cities, he repurposed captured programs, combatants that won in the arena and so forth. Soon there was no need for programs to willingly join him when he could repurpose them en masse. Argon City was one of the first places where he was able to test this out.”

“But Dad told me he was able to reverse the process easily by changing a few lines of code on a Guard's disc. It's how he was able to get the Light Flyer for us,” Sam sounded confused.

“Exactly,” Tron replied.

“Clu didn't need to compile a whole code when he had disposable soldiers whom he knew could be easily killed and easily replaced if need be,” Quorra replied.

“Phoebus said it took years of tampering with Thalia, Reeve, and Gates' discs to undo Clu's programming,” Tron replied, “they were one of the first ones to be repurposed.” He remembered the process, stuck in the tubes, watching as their code were extracted, replaced by the corrupted code.

“So what you're saying is that, the glitching that's been affecting the others back in the City may not affect those here?”

“Maybe,” Tron replied, “I left a query with Phoebus to look into once he and the others secured central security and turned it into a beacon. I hope I'm wrong though.”

“Either way, it'll be harder to change their programming,” Quorra replied, “if it's true. How do you propose we extract a Guard?”

“There was the glimmerings of a rebellion here,” Tron replied a small smile on his face at the relatively unfragmented memory of what happened here.

“One of the programs that was at the End of the Line did mention that the rebellion was finally moving to the City or something like that,” Sam replied, “this the origin point?”

“Yes,” Tron replied, “and I am hoping they are still active.”

“You don't think they are?” Quorra glanced at him through her helmet as they weaved their way through.

“I don't know what might have happened to their leader,” Tron swallowed past the uncomfortable lump in his throat. The last he remembered of his protege- “He was, is, known as the Renegade.”

“Renegade?” Quorra's voice was sharp. “You knew the Renegade?”

“Who?”

“When I left the Sanctuary to collect updates for your father, I heard rumors about a program only known as the Renegade giving some of Clu's lieutenants trouble. But then I also heard the Renegade was derezzed some time ago. Nothing since then save for some rumors that claim the Renegade was alive. But nothing to indicate as much activity in the many cycles since. Some say the Renegade was Tron, some say it was someone who wanted to be like Tron. Your father was adamant that it wasn't Tron; claimed to have seen him sacrifice himself to let him escape Clu during that ambush.”

“I trained two that bore the title of Renegade,” Tron said, keeping his eyes focused on the road. The uncorrupted memories were painful. Too many markers associated with them, with each program that took the name, attempted to take his name and be him. “One of whom had friendly programs that sheltered him and ultimately become the formation of the Resistance here in Argon City. I am hoping they are still active and can help us acquire a Guard.”

“Wouldn't it be easier for us to just grab one, shove him or her into an alley and figure out their software upgrade date?”

“We don't know the security protocols here,” Quorra pointed out.

“It would be easy to scan and figure them out, except it would alert every single system monitor in the area,” Tron replied, his tone mildly rebuking. It was interesting that unlike Alan-One, SamFlynn seemed not to understand security protocols as much.

“Sorry,” Sam seemed a little put out, “not really into security that much. I'm more prone to hacking and breaking security locks. Jet, don't you start about white hat hacking and whatnot.”

“Ah,” Tron replied, “then I apologize, SamFlynn. I had not realized Users had different functions when it came to creation of programs.”

“S'okay,” SamFlynn shrugged, a habit Tron saw Flynn do many times when he was indifferent or accepted an apology. It was a very User mannerism that he never quite got, but he supposed it meant he was forgiven for his lack of understanding.

“Alan-One's...son, Jethro is the opposite of yourself?” Tron asked, hesitant. He was rather curious about the mysterious Jet or Jethro SamFlynn seemed to have a good nature, if not slightly competitive relationship with; judging by the one-sided conversations he heard from the User.

Sam laughed, a warm sound over his audio filters. Tron was sharply reminded of how much it sounded like Flynn's own laugh. It made him suddenly feel the loss of his friend.

“Nah,” Sam replied, “Jet's what we call a white hat hacker. He's breaking locks and security systems, but also recreates them and programs them to be better. White hat meaning his work is legal and by the law. Me? If I didn't work for ENCOM, well, maybe it would be a little illegal, but I see much fun in that. Makes my workers work harder, at least that's what I think.”

There a long pause before Sam's sigh blasted across the audio filters. “Tron, Jet wanted me to tell you that he's more prone to creating repair programs to help the security ones that others create. He calls himself a white hat hacker of support programs, whatever that means. I think he's just secretly happy that you're curious about him- ow, ow...ow!”

Tron glanced at Sam through his helmet feeling bemused. He was not sure how to take such remarks and glanced over to see Quorra shaking her head silently as they slowed to match the traffic patterns.

“From what both have told me, both admired you when they were children, smaller learning programs if you wish to be literal, and meeting you has been their wish,” Quorra replied.

“Quorra!” the plaintive embarrassment was clear over the comms and Tron could not help the small laugh that ran its command line through him. He also could imagine Jethro perhaps feeling the same.

“I am flattered to have their esteem for such a long time,” he replied, “I do hope that you, SamFlynn, and by extension, Jethro would consider my actions previous to my current reversion to not have overwritten the esteem.”

“We don't,” Sam shrugged again, “you weren't yourself.” Tron could hear some bitterness tinged in the User's tone, and wondered if his words reminded the User of the argument he had with Alan-One. But whatever it was, the levity of the moment was clearly gone and Tron refocused back on the road.

“We bear right here.” He directed SamFlynn and Quorra with two pointed fingers before he took the ramp and exited the highway. They followed and soon Tron pulled up to the familiar construct that was once Able's Garage, but had been changed to Mara's Garage when the old program was derezzed many cycles ago. Numerous programs were milling about, most of them dutifully executing their directives, but there was immediately something different about them. They all wore a yellow armband of sorts, marked with a digital signature that Tron recognized as Clu's.

He frowned, but hide his unease under a subroutine as a program glanced their way before turning deeper into the spacious garage. “Mara! Three here to see you!”

“Wow...” Tron glanced back to see SamFlynn staring around him, wide-eyed and in awe. “I've...wow...I never seen planes, flyers, whatever, anything like this...”

“Sam...” Quorra cautioned before the User cleared his throat and tried to focus around him. But Tron could see even Quorra was amazed by the multitude of various forms of transportation that existed in the Garage.

“Greetings,” the feminine voice that Tron had not heard in a very long time spoke up and he turned back to see not the familiar blue-haired program he knew for a brief time, but rather a yellow-white haired program approach them. Some of her lines were more yellow than white, a mark of an administrative program. A quick passive scan of her code pinged back with the information that this was the same Mara he met a long time ago, just with more modules and upgrades since that time. He dared not scan too aggressively as he knew his subroutine was not that of a Guard. However, he did note she was also wearing a yellow band around her arm with Clu's signature on it.

“Haven't seen the three of you here before, you new?”

“We've only arrived from the City,” Quorra explained.

Mara's eyes widened with surprise. “We don't get visitors from the City that often anymore. Most of them are data couriers, but even then they don't have their own transport and we normally have to provide them with ones. Are you all couriers?”

“Yes,” Tron quickly replied, “our lightcycles are in need of repairs and configurations as we are supposed to deliver an important packet of information to Purgos.”

“Purgos?” Mara looked surprised. “That's Tesler's dump. Our great leader Clu must want him further humiliated.” Her smile was razor thin and edged with a bitterness Tron in all of his cycles could never have associated with Mara – or a least the Mara he knew – but it was rather surprising to see.

However, he quickly buried his surprise under another subroutine, right next to the first one and instead nodded. “The packet's got a...surprise, shall we say, for him.”

Mara laughed, bitter sounding, and nodded. “I look forward to the gathering to view the surprise once its been delivered.”

“Of course,” Tron wanted to query further, but caution pressed upon his processes.

“We are more than happy to start on your repairs.” She turned and waved a hand before two programs came over. Tron vaguely recognized them, but could not pinpoint the memory of where he might have met them. “Hopper, Link, please expedite the repairs on the three couriers lightcycles.”

Tron handed over his baton thankful that it was at least from central security. The coding of the lightcycles was different from where one received their batons, but the base layer would at least keep their covers that they were couriers of sorts from the City.

“Yes ma'am,” the two programs took their batons and walked away, rezzing them on platforms to begin a diagnostic and repair.

“If you'll follow me to my office, I will need to enter your serials and signature for documentation purposes,” Mara said brightly.

Tron was alarmed. It was the equivalent of revealing their real identities. There was no way Phoebus' subroutines were able to mask a digital signature and serial. Tron knew he could do it, but considering that his signature was tainted with the malware, it was a moot point and would immediately sent out a lot of alerts and notifications he did not want others knowing.

“Uh...” Sam started.

“We were told we did not have to enter such information,” Quorra interjected quickly before Tron could voice his protest, “what protocols have changed?”

Mara turned back, her brows knitted together in confusion. She crossed her arms across her chest and tapped the yellow band that was on her arm. “The Admin Monitor has been requesting all repairs and basic functions throughout Argon be documented since our glorious leader Clu installed him here.”

“Hmm,” Tron hummed quietly as he quickly processed a plan, “then the data packet that was sent in the last update has not been unpacked and distributed here.” He let his hands hang by his side, but sent a quick signal with his fingers to SamFlynn, the same signal he used to communicate with Flynn at times, hoping in some way the son of Flynn would understand to not interfere. More than once, he wished he had some kind of wireless-ghost access to the Users in order to communicate with them more effectively.

“Sure,” Mara looked unsure, but nodded all the same. “I apologize, couriers, but until that order has been dispatched to all administrators I must insist.”

“Would it be possible to see the latest version of command lines that have been processed? It would help diminish some confusion to the latest patches we have been assigned to deliver and enable us to make our report to Clu once we have delivered the package.”

The yellow-white haired program looked worried, but nodded again. “Of course, please, follow me.”

“Quorra,” Tron turned to the former ISO and suppressed a command line for his next words in slight effort to force them out naturally, “please stay here with Sam to ensure our lightcycles are repaired in an efficient manner.”

“Hey!” Mara's reaction was immediate, “my workers are hard working programs and are efficient-”

“There is already clear cause of a data slowness here that we cannot account for,” Tron turned back to face the yellow-haired program. He was beginning to think that the Garage which he thought could have been a safe and secure place was no longer in the many cycles since he last remembered. “You will be remiss in my command line to ensure our data packet is delivered in an efficient manner.”

Mara frowned and for a moment, Tron thought he saw a command line being suppressed behind her eyes, but without the possibility of deep scanning her like he normally did, he was not able to catch what it was.

“Are you-”

“We will do ask you command, sir,” Quorra replied, cutting SamFlynn off. The other User looked rather bewildered, but managed to compose himself quickly. It was clear that SamFlynn was not used to hiding himself nor efficient on the uptake, but very quick for improvisational methods which reminded Tron greatly of the older Flynn. Tron turned back to Mara who looked angry, but decided it was not a fight worth fighting and instead turned and gestured curtly for him to follow.

Tron wished he could send a silent command for Quorra and SamFlynn to leave as soon as possible if things did not look right, but he hoped that by leaving the two out in the spacious garage, they would be able to leave if need be and continue to Purgos. The map he gave to Quorra pinpointed a shop he hoped was still in use in the city. If not, it at least led him to an area where they would hopefully be able to find a reader for the disc.

His passive sensors suddenly pinged an alert and Tron stiffened. His gaze immediate went upwards and he searched the rafters of the Garage, trying to pinpoint where the alert came from. He did not notice anything amiss among the stillness of the rafters, not even a sway of one of the variations of lightflyers hanging above.

“Is there something wrong?” Mara asked her voice sharp.

“No,” he replied as he cautiously sent a ping out, but received none in return. He turned his gaze back down to her and gestured for her to continue towards her office.

They entered and the door slid close behind them. Mara rounded the desk and sat in her chair, gesturing for him to do the same. “Give me a few microns to prepare the data for you,” she said as she started to type in her interface.

“The Admin still has you wearing the bands,” Tron started conversationally.

“Yes, it is to ensure our allegiance to His Excellency,” the program replied.

“The City has long posted an ordinance that did not require the use of allegiance bands,” the memory was a little corrupted, but Tron remembered that there was once a time where bands were used to distinguish between those who were loyal to Clu and those who were not. In his corrupted memories as Rinzler, he did not see them and inferred after Clu's complete takeover of The Grid, they were gotten rid of, all programs united under his leadership.

“Perhaps that ordinance is still under review by the Admin,” Mara's smile did not reach her eyes, but her voice was polite – perhaps a little too polite for Tron. He picked up on the not-so masked anger in them before it disappeared under a subroutine.

“Perhaps it is why there is such data slowness here,” Tron prodded. He was sure Mara was hiding something. Once he was able to hone in the masking subroutines, he could trace it in his passive scans of her. “Your Admin taking his time to review data packets sent by couriers and so forth.”

Mara merely nodded before flinging what was on her interface onto a tablet and slid it towards him. “Here is the latest data packets we function admins have received.”

Tron reached over and picked the tablet up. He only had a micron's worth of warning before all of his passive and active sensors screamed at him that the tablet was a trap. But it was too late, as Tron felt the encrypted layers unlock and the trap sprung. Arcs of energy immediately rippled through him and he grunted in surprise and pain as he suddenly found himself locked onto the table and chair, bands of security layers holding him place.

He grunted as more static played over him, nearly short-circuiting him.

“I'm sorry,” he barely heard Mara's voice over the static that filled his audio filters and through his prone gaze, saw her form leave her desk and come around. Her face filled his and he saw apology in her eyes. “I'm sorry I had to do this to you, but you, and your fellow couriers are the best chance I've had in a very long time.”

Tron gritted his teeth and tried to pull against his restraints, earning a sympathetic look from Mara.

“You'll be safe here, I'll make sure that you and the other two you came with aren't harmed,” she said, her hand hovering close to him, but did not touch. “I had to call him, sorry.” She abruptly pulled away and started to back up.

“Mara! Mara, wait-” Tron stopped as the program quickly left the office, the door closing behind her.

Tron gritted his teeth again as he immediately activated his internal hacking modules and focused his scan on the datapad that was trapping him there. He pulsed his own passive sensors and could feel the familiar pings of Users nearby being herded in a direction. He could not tell if they were being harmed or not, but knew he could not rely on what he could not sense for confirmation. However, all around the Users were many active programs and Tron cursed his own inattentiveness for allowing such a scenario to play out.

He should have been more aggressive, more aware even if there was risk of alerting the Admin. Mara's Garage was not a refuge anymore from the memories he thought were not corrupted. The bands of loyalty to the Admin and to Clu made it clear where they stood. The rebellion that he once fostered was clearly gone and Tron suspected Mara called the Admin. She must have had some kind of upgrade or sensor that enabled her to see through Phoebus' subroutines, otherwise, she would not have trapped him, SamFlynn or Quorra.

He focused on the clever bit of coding that was embedded into the datapad and picked it apart ruthlessly. The static to his audio filters finally lifted and he grunted as he pulled his hands from the datapad, letting it drop to the ground. Tron lifted a foot up and smashed the pad for good measure, derezzing it into little blocky pieces. However, at the same time, he felt his passive sensors ping a warning alert and the presence of a very high-level Admin instinctively made him dampen and mask his own presence into a very small space.

He could pick out the distinct markers of the Admin's overwhelming presence and dread along with a long dormant emotion he thought only applied to one other program on The Grid made itself known. Dread, quickly chased by fury. Tron gritted his teeth and hastily tried to mask it under several layers of encrypted subroutines. Damn Mara for calling _him_. And damn Clu for installing _him_ as the Admin of Argon after Tesler's exile to Purgos even though Phoebus warned him.

“And why have you called me here after so many cycles?”

“We are following protocols that have been established,” Mara's voice was strong and proud and Tron curled a hand into a fist. He could not rush out, not with his sensors returning the information about the numerous Garage workers that were there – potential hostile programs. If his calculations were right, there was also a good number of Black Guards that Dyson brought with him. Two hostile factions to fight against to ensure SamFlynn and Quorra's escape.

“Three couriers from the City have arrived and per your directive if couriers were to ever set foot in this Garage, we were to notify you of their arrival. We have not extracted their data packets if you wish to examine them.”

“Hey-” SamFlynn's protest was very loud before he was abruptly silenced.

Tron padded silently over to the door, hoping that the masking subroutine Phoebus built was holding and the Admin was not actively scanning.

“Ah, yes...the proverbial orders from our glorious leader Clu,” Dyson's voice was as pleasant as ever. Tron peered out to see the familiar visage looking affably around. “I've been waiting many cycles for this.” Dyson paused as he walked deeper into the Garage. “Do you know why I made sure most of the couriers with their data packs walk from the train? Just so I get a chance to read their datapackets for any upgrades or orders that came from central security. Some of them useful, most of them useless for such a lawless and disorganized imperfection like Argon.”

“But Clu, now Clu's orders are always packaged with the utmost speed in mind. Normally arriving to my command ship with haste, but sometimes well, the transport method can hit a few snags.” The program looked distinctly unimpressed and unafraid and it took most of Tron's own will to suppress every instinct to unleash his own security protocols to beat Dyson senseless.

“Thank you, Mara, for alerting me as soon as possible. I wonder what kind of data packet this is now,” Dyson replied, “I suppose you want me to release the bands that are suppressing parts of your command lines as a reward for your many cycles of loyalty, do you not?”

“No, Dyson,” Mara's reply startled Tron as he saw her move from the crowd of programs that gathered to witness the spectacle.

“No?”

“We don't need you to release it, because we've already done it ourselves,” Mara replied, her voice changing from its pleasant lilt to one of hardened anger. The familiar buzzing whine of a disc activating was the only warning. “Now! Everyone, now! Resist!”

Tron's sensors activated in a myriad of alerts as he watched the Garage explode into chaos. Almost every single worker in the Garage activated their discs and hurled themselves towards the Black Guards. Many of the Guards were instantly derezzed and even Dyson was caught off guard as he drew his disc and fought off the sudden ambush. Masking codes exploded across the area, engulfing it in a dusty cloud of redirected data. Tron knew that it was his chance. He masked his presence under several layers of encryption, pulling Phoebus' own subroutine tight around him as he dashed out of Mara's office and into the cloud, homing in on the two error-message beacons he knew was SamFlynn and Quorra.

With his lights dimmed to the point where he was not able to even be seen through the redirected data clouds, he was able to effortlessly weave in and out of the fight, and arrived shortly by their side.

“SamFlynn, Quorra,” he murmured, startling the two who had hidden behind a large transport loader. Both still had their hands bound in front.

“Who-what- Oh! Tron?” SamFlynn blinked, looking up and down, “what- geez, don't do that!” The User hissed as Tron gestured for the two to lift their bound hands up. He pulled his disc from his mount and activated it, slicing through them with ease.

“We need to leave,” Tron ignored SamFlynn's words.

“But the Resistance-”

“We cannot help them,” Tron shook his head at Quorra's protest. “Even if they masked their true allegiance, we need to get to Purgos.”

“But-” SamFlynn started to frown before Dyson's voice boomed across the smoky Garage.

“Renegade! How lovely of you to join us after so many cycles! I knew that was your presence I sensed when I arrived.”

Tron could not help himself a curious prickle of coding that ran through him as he peered out of the loader along with the two Users. The smoke cleared a little for them to see a flash of what could have been a regular program with white-blue lights except for the gigantic 'T' shape emblazoned in the middle of the program's chest.

“What the...”

“The Renegade still exists,” Quorra breathed out quietly.

Tron sent an encrypted ping towards the program, a part of him wondering, hoping it was whom he thought it was. It was on a long dormant frequency, but if the Renegade was whom he thought it was... But his hope was dashed as he received nothing in return. This was a new Renegade and it was clear that whatever program was using the moniker was not his old apprentice. Still, Tron watched as the Renegade engaged Dyson, noting that the punches and kicks thrown were somewhat acrobatic, but had a lot more force and power behind it. There was none of the lithe agility he knew belonged to his apprentice and it was clear that this new Renegade's fighting style was honed from cycles and cycles of combat; not from casual games with friends or from climbing the streets and buildings of Argon.

“Who-”

“We need-”

“We need to go,” Tron insisted, cutting off SamFlynn's confused query and Quorra's attempted protest in order to stay. He wanted to stay and fight, but the Users were in danger and the same command line that drove him to fight the gridbug at the sanctuary drove him now.

“But the Resistance-”

Tron barely had a passive warning before he threw both of his arms around the two Users and pulled them to the ground as the loader next to them suddenly caved from the force of an impact. Even before the dust settled, Tron peered up to see the Renegade pick itself from the impact crater. However, that was all he got to see as he immediately shoved the two Users out of the way of an incoming disc.

Tron drew his own and blocked, twisting and rolling to his feet before kicking the Black Guard that attacked them away. “Come-” he did not get to finish his sentence as he turned to the two Users only to see them draw their discs and charge into the fray of the Black Guards fighting the members of the Garage. Tron sent a silent oath down his own paths as he re-engaged the Black Guard that he had kicked away.

The Guard was no match as Tron twisted underneath a block and instantly derezzed him, scattering voxels everywhere. His directives were screaming at him to protect Quorra and SamFlynn and he processed the situation around him as he engaged two more Black Guards. It seemed the whole of the Garage were part of the still-alive Resistance, but they were only basic repair programs, struggling against hardened and programmed Black Guards. Mara's familiar signature was a whirl around a few Black Guards as she hovered protectively over a few injured programs. The Renegade whom he could not readily identify was engaged against several Guards, clearly with combat programming as the Black Guards were easily disarmed or derezzed. It certainly confirmed that this was not his former apprentice as he knew the Black Guards would never be derezzed.

He needed to ensure SamFlynn and Quorra's safety. They were in danger and like Flynn, he could not stand idly by as the danger persisted. Tron immediately pinpointed the quickest source and hoped that the Creator was with him as he masked himself with two layers of subroutines and deleted the one Phoebus made.

The effect was instantaneous.

The Black Guards that attacked him immediately pulled back, their postures apologetic and their discs lowered. He could imagine queries thrown at him from them, but suspected it was part of the firewalled section that Alan-One built to contain the Rinzler part of him. He ignored them as he headed towards his target. He could only suspect his silence as Rinzler, perhaps both as a program who did not vocalize nor communicated much through whatever wireless he had with the rest of the Black Guards would be part of his command lines and routines.

As he walked forward, disc held in his hand, the programs fighting around him slowed, the Guards backing away, while the basics fighting them had expressions of shock and fear running through them. It was clear even in another City, Rinzler was very well known. But the ultimate test remained before him and Tron finally parted enough of the combatants to approach the Admin of Argon City, Dyson. Around him, he could sense the tide of the fight slowing and stopping, all taking in his presence.

“Rinzler,” Dyson stood before him, arms crossed across his chest. He looked unscathed, staying mostly out of the fray once the initial ambush was fought off. The sudden buzzing hiss of a disc thrown at Tron was instantly deflected as he lifted his hand, sending it back to its owner. He turned to see the Renegade grab the returned disc, standing by the edges, having dispatched the Black Guards. Mara was nearby, also surrounded by numerous voxels of former Black Guards.

He turned back in time to see Dyson tilting his head and narrowed his eyes a little. It seemed the Admin tried to contact him on whatever wireless frequency Rinzler used to communicate with others. He ignored it and instead, conveyed his displeasure at the former security monitor's presence as best as he could.

Dyson pursed his lips for a second before tilting his head to the other side. “Ignore me all you want Rinzler, but it would behoove you to at least have sent a communique to let me know you had an operation here. Though I really don't know why Clu would have you here considering you're supposed to have gone with him cycles ago with the project.”

Dyson shrugged as if it was no consequence. “Still, I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. If you're here, you obviously know of the purge for all Resistance. Thank you, I suppose, for finally allowing me to find the Renegade and arrest her for her crimes.”

Tron frowned behind his helmet. He wanted to get Dyson and the Black Guards to leave, hoping that his presence as Rinzler and from what Dyson inferred about an operation here, would do the trick. But it seemed the Argon City Admin was far more stubborn than he remembered. But before he could do anything, the derezzing screams of two Black Guards was followed by the decisive statement from Quorra as she stepped over the piles of voxels and data shards.

“I won't allow you to do that,” she emerged from the crowd, a baton and disc in hand as she stood in front of the Renegade against Dyson.

“ISO...no...you're a-” Dyson's expression morphed into one of genuine surprise. Tron knew Dyson scanned Quorra per his capacity as a system monitor and discovered the change.

“User,” SamFlynn stepped out, disc unhooked but inactive as he stood next to Quorra. “Users are back on The Grid so you might want to reconsider your allegiances.”

“Rinzler what is-”

Tron drew his disc and activated it, pointing it underneath Dyson's throat. His many cycles of working with Users and fighting for them still made them unpredictable. It did not bother him as much as he took advantage of their unpredictability when he could. And in this case, he knew he had Dyson cornered. Tron dropped the first masking subroutine, letting Dyson see his familiar visage, lines, and circuit colors. “Hello, old friend,” he greeted.

“...Tron,” Dyson sounded genuinely surprised.

Whispers and queries battered him as both Black Guards and basics stared. Tron could feel a change in the code of the area, alighting with the declaration of Users back on The Grid. He did not know if it was SamFlynn's intention all along, but the User lit a beacon with his firm declaration. However, it only fed through the surface, like a masking code, not like when Flynn made changes or improvements to The Grid itself. Perhaps it gave more weight to the claim of Alan-One having Creator capabilities like Flynn.

But whatever it was, Tron felt the small reverberation of change spread in the code and tilted his head down towards the ground. “Scan that Dyson? Users have returned. Change is coming and Clu can't help you now.”

Dyson shook his head. “No...no, that can't be. That-” He stilled just as the same time as Tron felt an inexplicable _pull_ and the two of them, along with the other Black Guards turned towards the direction of the City.

He realized Alan-One and Phoebus turned central security into a beacon. It had begun and Tron fought the pull, the inexplicably _strong_ command line to come towards the beacon. He shuddered as he knew where the process came from and willed his own routines and command lines to adhere to the firewall that Alan-One built into him to contain the corrupted programming Clu infected him with. He wanted nothing more than to scratch at his face, to try to discard the malware that ate deep into him. It was the source of the pull that he could not hide under the firewalls.

“Sir...we should-”

“...Need to leave now...”

“Calling us...calling us back...”

All around them, the Black Guards murmured, all turned towards the direction of the City. Some dropped their hands and discs to their sides as they slowly started to walk, their steps uneasy, shuffling as if they had some kind of programming glitch.

“...No...no...” Tron turned to see Dyson shaking his own head, both of his hands pressed against the temples. He was fighting the draw of the beacon.

“No...no...no!”

“Tron! Look out-”

Tron reacted even as SamFlynn shouted, his passive sensors screaming a warning before he rolled away from Dyson, the buzzing hiss of a disc being thrown at him narrowly missing him. He got to his feet in time to block a kick to his face before the face of the last program he expected to see appeared before him. Shock coursed through his command lines and along with the _pull_ of the beacon he paid for his inattentiveness. The punch threw him off balance enough that the program brushed past him and grabbed Dyson by the arm before just as quickly rezzing a lightmobile and speeding away.

“Beck...” Tron whispered as the program drove away with Dyson in tow.

“Beck! No!” his called echoed by the Renegade and Mara.

Tron could not believe what he saw in those few nanos. He could not believe that Beck's lines were the orange hues of the Black Guard, nor could he believe the utterly blank look on his former apprentice's face. Just...what happened to Beck? Tron turned, suppressing the query under a subroutine as the noise of the Black Guards' murmurs rose to a fever pitch, the mass of black and orange seemingly ignoring everyone and moving out of the Garage. Some climbed onto the Recognizers that arrived, while others were shuffling back onto Dyson's command ship. The whine of a Recognizer powering up made Tron involuntarily duck a little at the backwash before it rose into the air and sped off, clearly heading towards the City.

“...Is that it?” SamFlynn wondered quietly.

“The beacon,” Quorra stated. “Alan and Phoebus activated the beacon.”

“Derezz them!” Mara suddenly shouted, point towards the retreating Black Guards.

Tron held up a hand, pulsing deep into the long forgotten coding of the emergency wireless. _No!_ he ordered decisively.

The basics all stopped, eyes turning towards him. He registered their surprise as he shut the emergency wireless down before the eruption of all programs in the vicinity could overwhelm him and the others. There was a reason why Flynn coded the wireless capabilities of The Grid to only activate in an emergency. Every single command line would be read by others and those with limited capacities would be overwhelmed. Most of the time when the emergency wireless was activated, it was just himself and a handful of Guards or a couple of builders.

“It's Tron...” a couple of the programs whispered again.

Tron ignored them and focused on the basics that remained in the Garage. It took him no small amount of effort to ignore the _pull_ of the beacon. He wished there was some way he could mask the malware, to put a firewall between it, but it was too embedded into his code. He needed Alan-One's help. To his relief, it seemed the programs were not ignoring his orders, even if they looked rather bewildered. They still remembered and it meant he still had admin-security privileges on The Grid. Relief flooded him as he realized he could still prevent programs from needlessly derezzing each other. That he could still protect The Grid as the Users installed him to do.

“It's...really you...” Mara took a step forward, her yellow-white hair bouncing in the light. “...Tron...Lives...”

The quiet murmur of his name being repeated over and over again rolled through the assembled programs before he held up a hand to quiet them. “We,” he gestured towards SamFlynn and Quorra who stood near the Renegade, their discs back on their mounts, though Quorra still held her baton loosely in her hands. “We,” he repeated again, “need your help.”

The programs looked among themselves before some reluctantly nodded. “These two here are Users, SamFlynn and Quorra.”

“Quorra?” The Renegade shifted and all eyes turned to her. Her bluish white-lined helmet retracted, and Tron frowned. The former commander of Tesler's forces that once occupied Argon, was apparently now the Renegade. How Commander Paige became the one to bear that moniker was something Tron did not know. “Are you...”

Quorra turned back, tilting her head to the side in recognition. “...Paige...isn't it?”

“Yes, but you're an ISO?”

“Former ISO,” Quorra replied, peeling part of her sleeve down of her suit to show that the once familiar glow that marked her as an ISO was now unlit and faded against her skin. “I became a User.”

The programs in the Garage erupted into unintelligible murmurs. Tron watched as Paige drew herself up and walked towards Quorra. She was clearly a head taller than the User. Tron scanned her trying to sense her intent, but it was hidden underneath several layers of encryption. He was about to sent a command line to brute force hack the encryption when her intention became clear and she stuck her hand out to Quorra.

“I am sorry your kind was wiped out from The Grid, UserQuorra,” Paige sounded stiff and formal, but there was clear sadness in her command lines and eyes. “But I am glad you survived and was able to return.”

“Thank you,” Quorra clasped her hand into Paige's and shook it. “I see you are the famed Renegade of Argon City.”

“After a fashion,” Paige did not smile, but gestured towards Mara and the others, “we are what is left of the Resistance after many cycles of attrition and many battles against Clu, Dyson, and Tesler's forces. Somewhere after Clu's invasion Clu abruptly left, leaving Dyson and Tesler in charge of the subjugation of Argon. Then when Dyson and Tesler captured the first Renegade, I saw the truth of the Occupation. I changed my allegiances and allied myself with Mara's Garage. Dyson eventually halted all Resistance, forcing those of Mara's Garage to wear the allegiance bands or risk instant deresolution. Those who tried to protest were sent to the Games in the City where they always met their end. Thankfully, we've been hacking the bands for a while now.”

“We recently sent two programs, at great risk, from the Garage to see if we could gather support from programs we heard were trying to start a Resistance of their own in the City. We heard Zed was captured by the Black Guard and derezzed himself by jumping off of the Games' platforms before he could be placed in them. The other, Bartik, we have not heard from since last he pinged his location at the End of the Line bar,” Mara picked up the narrative and Tron frowned.

The End of the Line bar was run by Castor, an ISO named Zuse who hid himself and worked with Clu. As Rinzler, he remembered being summarily dismissed to seek out SamFlynn, Flynn, and Quorra to ensure they were dead. He knew Clu blew up the End of the Line bar after retrieving Flynn's master disc.

“The End of the Line bar is gone,” Tron spoke up, “destroyed by Clu. There were no survivors.”

“Bold of you to wear the guise and colors of Clu's top enforcer, Tron,” Paige commented. Tron merely nodded his assent to her question. Though he usually spoke bluntly and answered truthfully, in this case, he was not ready for anyone else to find out he was Rinzler. He suspected Dyson knew, but it was clear the program was subservient and terrified of Rinzler. He supposed after Rinzler was created, so to speak, Dyson was perhaps out of favor or in compare to Rinzler.

“Dyson will return,” Mara cautioned, “we must be ready.”

“Dyson may, but his army will not,” Tron corrected.

“We sure about that?” SamFlynn abruptly cut in.

“I can feel it,” he looked at SamFlynn who frowned before nodding grimly. It seemed the User understood that his malware was like an internal siren, calling for him to go towards the beacon. He abruptly pushed the need to go under a layer of encryption, hoping it would stay there instead of ripping through the encryption layer. The attempt was useless as he could feel it already tearing the encryption apart. “We need to take advantage of the distraction and go.”

“Go where?” Mara asked as some of the other programs murmured their curiosity and plaintive intent for them to stay, to help them.

“Purgos,” Tron replied.

“Tesler's territory? You're better off derezzing yourself than setting a single bit in there,” Paige replied, “Dyson exiled him there when he lost control of the situation. It's a haven of malware, gridworms, gridbugs, and dangers that one normally only sees in the deepest of the Outlands. Something else also stalks Purgos, draining the energy of programs that wander in there. It's left Tesler alone after all these cycles, so we think Tesler might be controlling it, but even Dyson doesn't stop there from what we've been able to observe.”

“There's something in there that we need,” SamFlynn frowned.

Mara crossed her arms and shook her head. “I don't know what Users would want with Purgos and it is beyond my programming to ask, but you should know that there is a firewall between Purgos and Argon City.”

“When did this go up?” Tron demanded.

“After Tesler's exile,” Mara looked at him, “like Paige said, a haven of gridbugs, worms, all sorts of unknown things that some claim to have only seen in the deepest depths of the Outlands.” She looked at them plaintively, “If there's one thing Dyson did right, is ensure that whatever's in Purgos doesn't get out. Though he does condemn programs to their death to be sent either to Purgos or the Games.” She looked back and forth at them before uncrossing her arms. “I can give you a code to the firewall we stole from Dyson's carrier several cycles ago.”

“There's a catch,” SamFlynn's smile did not reach his eyes.

“Help us drive Dyson from Argon City once and for all,” Mara stated.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The whole bit regarding Radia and Ophelia was my attempt to reconcile the plot hole I accidentally introduced in "Tron: Adagio" and the actual events of "Tron: Evolution."


	9. ENCOM Part 1 & 2

Alan rubbed his eyes, trying to get the gummy feeling out of them. Exhaustion pulled at him, even though he slept for at least a few hours since Tron, Quorra and Sam's departure for Argon City. Silence still reigned on the other end of the comms they established, from Sam and the others in the outside world. Alan knew Roy's silence was because he was more than likely coding, but from Lora, he wasn't sure. Jet was more than likely taking Sam's side in anger, his son having that habit of sticking close by Sam when things got tough.

Maybe he should have meditated, even though he did not know the first thing about meditation. ENCOM had 'wellness' days where they would bring in experts on health and wellness and even offered a short session called Meditation Mondays. But Alan was usually too busy to attend, letting the other board members attend for company morale purposes.

He rubbed his eyes again. His latest dream was vivid, and left him with the lingering image of Sam and Jet when they were growing up. They had been pretending to engaged in mock disc battles with their frisbees. They had even colored them and drew on them to make them look like the discs he saw here. Sam's eager puppy, before it ran off to the Tompkins household, chased them around and they pretended it was a gridbug.

Alan remembered Flynn walking by and crouched down, his hands splayed down and 'pretended' to shut the grid down, shouting that he was giving them an advantage over the gridbug. The boys loved it, and so did that little puppy as it bounded over to Flynn and started to lick him. Flynn pretended he was getting attacked and asked the boys to save him. They obliged and Alan distinctly remembered Flynn turning towards him, calling him 'Tron' to which he only rolled his eyes, waved his hand and told Flynn that it looked like he was handling it well. It was not the first time Flynn slipped and called him Tron. Back then, he had no idea why Flynn kept calling him after a program he wrote. Now, he knew better.

Alan remembered glimpsing the disconcerting look on Flynn's face when he turned to go back in to see what Lora was cooking. Back then, he did not think much of it, his thoughts turning to spend more time with his wife on one of her long weekends. But this time, Alan saw it before the dream ended. In hindsight, he supposed because Tron bore his likeness, it must have struck Flynn a different way than if he did not have knowledge of The Grid.

He rubbed his eyes again, yawning into the back of his hand. He turned his focus back onto the interface spread before him. The Grid, for an independent OS and computer built in the 1980s, was a lot more complex than he imagined. He managed to pick his way through the fabric of central security, peeling back the layers and layers of coding. Some of it was Flynn's own distinctive code, the building blocks, but many of it, could have been his own.

He suspected it was Tron's handiwork, having built this as a hub for all system monitors. Layers and layers of subroutines kept central security running optimally and on redundant backups if there was ever a catastrophic failure of The Grid. In a way, Alan was proud of the care his program put into running The Grid. It was clear Tron cared a lot about his directives and executed them as best as he could. He was able to view many of Tron's command lines and processes while he was initially fixing him, but having heard most of it through his program's own narrative put things in perspective. Unlike Users and apparently ISOs, his security program's narrative was succinct and to the point, no emotional inflection, nothing to indicate his program's own feelings.

However, it was telling the steps Tron took to mitigate the damage while executing Flynn's will for The Grid. It seemed programs, or basics – as the term was thrown around more than once – were not coded to emote or to consider emotion a driving factor. They did process logical steps based on extrapolation of data points that they received in feedback. Perhaps that was a basic program's way of emoting, he supposed, and eventual execution of their directives.

But technically, if Flynn wrote all of the other system monitor programs in The Grid, they should all logically follow the same command lines and come to the same conclusion. At least that was how he saw it. Yet, Phoebus was a program who clearly followed a different directive than Tron, but was loyal to Tron. Pavel was most certainly not a system monitor, but was re-purposed to become an admin system monitor by Clu. It posed the question of how many system monitors did Flynn import into the system to help Clu. And of those, how many were like Phoebus, and how many might have died or were repurposed by Clu.

“Phoebus,” he called out as he absently continue to code.

“User Alan-One,” the program was prompt, standing next to him with an expectant look.

“How many system monitors did Flynn import into The Grid?” he asked.

“Nine Admin-level system monitors. Those of us who were called the Guards are known as system monitors, but we are vary from activity monitoring to resource monitoring. Some of us are application service or performance managers, but our designations and patterns are of the Guard components.”

“Nine?”

“I myself am an activity monitor with oversight of the Games. My bond program to whom I am bundled to is Thalen, a siren at the Games. I was given higher access when Tron was fighting the ISO-Gridbug hybrid Ariadne. This has allowed me to have a broader access to my directives and core programming,” Phoebus replied. Alan could hear a certain amount of pride in the program's voice.

“The coup must have been hard for you to hide your loyalties,” he said and Phoebus shrugged.

“It was not an easy subroutine to write, but Clu also overlooked those who monitored the activity of the Games for the most part. I do not know what his directives were regarding the Games, aside from changes to the rules after the Creator's disappearance, but there was no noticeable command directive override. The Games have operated as-is since its inception. The only updated directive was the deresolution of all losers and that was only sent after Clu declared the Creator gone.”

Alan looked up at the program. “You got lucky.”

“As I see it, sir,” Phoebus replied.

Alan tilted his head a little, curious. It seemed basic programs also understood the concepts of near misses and opportunities. He wondered if it was built into them in a sense of machine learning or perhaps some kind of advance artificial intelligence that could make leaps and bounds and extrapolate past their directives. It seemed to be the case with the many programming lines he was reading about Tron. Alan also did take into account that he programmed his own security monitor to be three laws compliant in terms of robotics.

That type of deep thinking was not helping his exhaustion and thinking as he pushed it to the side for now. Maybe if Flynn was alive, he'd be a better person to have this type of discussion with – having been in The Grid for the last twenty or so years.

“Can you tell me more about the nine?”

“All were under Tron's command and reported to Clu,” Phoebus replied, “the one that saved UserQuorra, Anon, was in beta when he was imported in and more than likely did not get the packet of updates to ensure he reported to Clu when the coup happened.”

Alan nodded, filing the information into the back of his mind. He flicked his fingers to where he saw a small file on Anon. It seemed Flynn could easily upgrade his programs with a patch, which he did when he glanced at a couple of the files in the central security, but Anon was an experimental program that Flynn tinkered with. Hence Phoebus' comment about the program in beta before being released.

“The others?”

“Dyson was Tron's second-in-command,” Phoebus replied, “or at least the first system monitor Flynn coded to help Tron. He was the first, if not one of the first to join Clu's coup. He is currently Argon City's Admin.”

“Tron didn't say anything,” Alan wondered out loud, a small frown on his face. Perhaps it was part of the memories that were firewalled or perhaps Tron did not think he would have much trouble eluding Dyson's scans.

“I would not know, sir,” Phoebus replied. “Two more run Bismuth and Gallium Cities, Agamemnon and Alexander. The rest were derezzed.”

Alan stopped typing and looked up at Phoebus. “Because they did not follow Clu's directive?”

“I believe so,” Phoebus pointed to his monitor, “search under admin files, sir.”

Alan quickly did so and sent the six readme text files of the system monitors that were clearly tagged with red markers up into a holographic display in front of him. The giant red 'x' that bisected their files burned an angry color into the muted soothing whites of the isolated tower. “That's six system monitors of nine who didn't follow Clu. They weren't in beta, except for Anon, right?”

“That is correct. All were operational,” Phoebus replied.

Alan rubbed his chin as he stared at the files of the six. They all had interesting names and he knew where Flynn got most of those names. He tapped on Anon's image, enlarging it. “Why would Flynn code you to have a helmet instead of a face like the others?” He pondered out loud before he shrunk the image down. He would have to ask Tron the next time he saw him about the cycles that led up to Clu's coup. Did Flynn suspect his program was about to go rogue? The only thing that Alan could reasonably conclude was that the coup came as a surprise and was certainly not approved by the majority of the system monitors.

He flicked the six images to the side before bringing up the lines of coding he was working on, more sure now that he at least had some evidence that he was not going to prematurely crash the system nor was he going to turn a lot of programs hostile to himself and to Tron. It was a bittersweet feeling as it confirmed his fears and suspicions that Flynn wanted him and Lora to eventually share in the wonderment that was The Grid.

Ever since Flynn retrieved his files and became CEO of ENCOM, he always suspected something was off. Alan chalked it up to an eccentricity of a programmer, well aware that he had his own courtesy of Lora's constant teasing. As Flynn's time at ENCOM became more erratic and prone to delays or late-night calls, he chalked it up to Flynn's genius in creation of ideas and ignored the times his friend slipped up and called him Tron. He attributed the slip up in the time they had the photoshoot where he was apparently the model for the new Tron game.

When Flynn was declared missing, Alan held out hope that his friend was on one of his random walkabouts, but after months of pressure from ENCOM, finally relented and declared his friend dead. It was only when Flynn's Will was read and he was gifted two things, his pager that was technically company property at the time, but it seemed Flynn signed an order for him to keep it on a permanent basis, and the keys to the arcade. During the reading, Alan had his own breakdown.

Lora had taken a short leave of absence from her work in Washington D.C. to stay with him and brought Jet along to keep Sam company. But in that spartan office on the top floor of ENCOM, Alan remembered walking away in the middle of the reading. He did not remember shedding any tears, but he did feel like someone ripped his own heart out and tried to shove it down the painful lump in his throat. He remembered taking the elevator down to the basement level where it once housed the laser facility, going into the empty bathroom, locking the door and punching the mirror in grief and rage. He did not remember if there was a scream of rage involved, but considering that his voice was hoarse after he and Lora went home and when he was getting patched up by her, he supposed he must have yelled himself hoarse.

He supposed in hindsight, he was furious, angry, both at ENCOM for forcing his hand in declaring Flynn dead, but also because Flynn went missing. He was angry for Flynn abandoning him, abandoning the company, abandoning everything. He was angry enough that he threw the arcade keys into the deepest recesses of his apartment's drawer, but kept the pager near his nightstand. He wanted nothing that reminded him of Flynn and threw himself into ENCOM's running. He did not realize then how much Flynn grew on him, was a friend, was almost like family to fill the void at times when Lora could not visit, keeping him company or challenging him with random bits of programming matches.

A thought occurred to Alan as he frowned. He turned to look up at Phoebus. “May I look at your coding?”

The program looked shocked, but nodded eagerly. “Of course,” he removed his disc and handed it to him.

He flicked it on and parsed through the coding before sitting back. “Well, I'll be damned. It was right in front of me the whole damn time,” he murmured as he stared at the coding that made up Phoebus. He glanced at the program again. “Did Clu keep the six discs of those who didn't align with him?”

“Yes,” Phoebus replied before gesturing with an hand. “Turing, Gates, can you check central storage for the six?”

“Sir,” the two programs left in search of the discs.

“Thanks,” Alan replied absently as he parsed through Phoebus' coding. “Flynn you damned conniving jackass...”

“Sir?”

“Phoebus, when were you compiled?” He asked as he pulled up the files again of the six.

“Cycle 1,366 to monitor the Games,” Phoebus replied.

Alan hummed as he stared at the compiling dates of the six. As suspected, all were in some chronological order with Anon being the last and thus in a beta state. “When was Clu's compile date?”

“Uh...sir, even I do not have that information,” Phoebus stuttered, sounding nervous.

“All right,” Alan waved an absent hand, “just curious.”

“Yes, sir, sorry sir,” the program apologized.

“So we know The Grid exists before Clu,” Alan replied, talking mostly to himself, “and Tron was imported in, so that needs to be a factor. Phoebus, besides Tron and probably Clu, who are the oldest programs on The Grid? I mean, someone had to help in building all these constructs here, right?”

“Yes sir,” Phoebus sounded puzzled, but Alan did not look at him, too focused on the contents of Phoebus' disc and what he was rapidly figuring out. “The Builders predate my existence. I was given a readme data packet on their abilities and what needed to be done to ensure their safety should gridbugs or any harm come towards them. Shaddox was their leader. His last recorded location was in Arjia City before he was derezzed from a gridbug attack.”

“Okay...” Alan replied before the sound of booted feet made him look up to see both Gates and Turing returning with six discs in their hands. He gestured towards the floor where he was sitting and they placed the discs in a neat pile. “Which one is Lovelace's?” The program named Lovelace had a compile date that was the earliest.

“This one sir,” the diminutive program known as Gates picked up one, handing it to him. This close, Alan could see that the program looked painfully young, almost like a teenager if he could place an age.

“May I ask what was your compile date?”

“Cycle 2,556, sir,” Gates replied, blushing at his sudden scrutiny, “I was an aeronautical program designed to monitor the weather patterns.”

“Interesting,” Alan replied, “there are weather patterns here?”

“The Creator wished to run a few simulations regarding bytes of data coverage he called clouds,” Gates replied, “I was coded to do that, but lacked a few modules to help keep track of the patterns.”

“Oh,” Alan replied. He wanted to know more, but forced himself to focus on his task. Tron and the others would be close to Argon City if everything went smoothly. “I'd like to know more, maybe you can tell me later.”

“Yes sir, thank you sir,” the program's lines brightened, clearly pleased that he was being asked.

“So question for all three of you,” Alan picked up what was Lovelace's inactive disc. “How do you tell which disc is which without looking through them?”

“...We...hold them and are able to surface scan?” Phoebus sounded confused.

“Ah, okay,” Alan replied, “well, here's a big difference between Users and programs. We don't have that capability.” He held up a hand as he saw their bewildered looks. “Useful tool, but we're more visual than by touch. Hence the emergency wireless protocols Tron's mentioned too.”

“But...you communicate with the outside world?”

“Yeah, we didn't know if that would work. I guess if we didn't hard code a scanner-like thing into our selves when we got into the Grid, it doesn't exist here,” Alan replied. He looked at the three who had thoroughly confused expressions on their face. “I can elaborate later. Just...need your help in figuring out who's disc is who's.”

“This is Lovelace's,” Gates pointed out. “Rossum, KatJ, Dot, Jackson, and Anon's.”

“Thanks,” Alan flicked on all six discs and scrubbed through to where he found the particular coding in Phoebus' disc. “Well...shit...” he swore quietly.

“Sir? Is it bad?” Phoebus sounded worried.

“Not really,” Alan replied as he glanced through all of the discs. “Helps me, but didn't really want to find out this way.” He handed the security monitor his disc back. “Flynn, Flynn, Flynn...you clever bastard.”

“Sir?”

“Going to have to code carefully, but your plan to turn central security into beacon will work, Phoebus,” Alan replied looking up at the three. “Good work.”

“Thank you sir,” the program straightened in pride.

“Is Pavel and the others secured?” he asked.

“Yes sir,” Turing spoke up, his voice deep and slow.

“All right. Give me a few minutes while I finish this coding, but I'm assuming that there are junction points in this building?”

“Yes sir,” all three nodded.

“You're going to have to hit all of them with this piece of coding. Make sure it's unobtrusive. Once you're all done, I'm going to activate it and it'll both shield this place, but turn it into a beacon.”

“And it will not destabilize The Grid?”

“No,” Alan shook his head. “Turns out, Flynn's been taking some of my own coding that I did with him from time to time and inserting it into the system monitors here. He called those sessions a coding game of sorts, trying to one up me. I'd look at his code and pick it apart, but I also learned a few things that I was able to sell to the Board at ENCOM. He look at my code and only shake his head. I thought he didn't care for it. But it seems like it was a gradual progression and merge of both his style and mine. It's not only the system monitors. You, Phoebus, have some of my code in you. Not as much as someone like Johnson or Anon, but a little bit. I can see how he merged the code together so that they're compatible, but it also means that this plan can be executed without destabilizing The Grid.

“It may explain how you interpreted your directive compared to someone like Dyson or others. Maybe they don't have as much of my coding merged with Flynn's. Maybe they do and got rectified by Clu. But it does explain the fundamental difference and why Tron opposed Clu's coup. Clu and Tron have two separate distinct codes working in tandem, but ultimately diverging when push came to shove.”

Silence answered him and Alan winced internally. He spoke too soon, too fast, too bluntly – the same way that ultimately got him kicked out of the position as CEO. He looked up, expecting to see angry or shocked expressions, but it was not the case. The three system monitors looked in awe and even young Gates was nodding. For a second Alan was confused before he realized why they were nodding.

Logic.

To them, especially security monitors, it was pure and simple logic. It made the most sense. It ran parallel to their command lines. He chuckled; it had been a very long time since he could be himself – the Flynn Lives movement not withstanding. Even that was hidden behind anonymous donations while maintaining a polite facade of moving on after Flynn.

He turned back and continued to type, finishing after a few minutes of silence. “All right,” he said as he stared at the code he created. He hoped it worked, based on what he saw on the discs. Flynn would have probably finesse it even more, but then again, his friend would have probably had bugs all over the finessing of the code. “Hmm...” he murmured out loud before reaching out to the screen gently pinched his index and thumb together on the section of code, similar to how he was extracting the malware from Tron.

It immediately responded by compressing and he tugged at it as he could see the code compress into a mote of light. It was rather interesting to see how something was literally zipped up in a compressed file in real time when he was used to the function happening on his screen. Alan kept his fingers pressed together as he lifted it away from the screen and stared at it. “Huh...okay...so...copying...”

“Sir, is that the code you wish us to place at points?” Phoebus spoke up.

“Yeah...just how do you copy something like this?” Alan glanced at the security monitor whose expression was a cross between perplexed and prideful.

“We are able to replicate codes if need be for distribution,” Phoebus replied.

“Good,” Alan replied before handing him the code. The program held the code in his palm before it turned into several flashing motes of light.

“Guards,” Phoebus called and Alan looked up to see the others gather around and each placed their hand over the motes, taking them. There were multiple flashes of light and Alan watched, fascinated as his piece of code was replicated. As soon as it was done, Phoebus straightened, his expression and tone taking on a more militaristic and respectful bent. “Sir, we will returning shortly. Please wait here where it is the safest.”

Before Alan could say anything, the programs dispersed, leaving through the various doors. “Hmph...precise, functioning. Perfunctory,” he muttered mostly to himself as he stood up, rubbing his hip. He stretched, yawning widely. “I like them,” he continued, walking around the various consoles, platforms, and staircases. He shook his head, a short laugh emerging from his lips. He was definitely starting to see why Flynn loved being here. It allowed him a measure of freedom to be himself.

“Sir,” Phoebus' voice suddenly blared across the room, startling him.

“Uh...” Alan hurried over to one of the consoles and stared at it for a second before pressing the button he hoped was something that would be able to be a reply all. Though he wasn't too sure if it would reply to the whole building. “Copy, Phoebus...”

“Code all set,” Phoebus replied.

“Standby,” Alan keyed the comm off before hurrying over to where he had been tinkering with the code.

He activated it at the same time he pushed a series of codes through the structure of the building and immediately saw the lights around him change. The orange was instantly replaced by the soft white that reminded him of Tron's lines. At the same time, several buzzing sounds erupted and Alan smiled crookedly at the fact that his shielding had gone up and was holding.

“All right Alan, you turned water into wine without making the fragmentation of The Grid even worse. For your next magic trick, let's figure out who's the good guys and who are the bad...” he commented as he brought up several visual feeds of what was happening outside central security. Now it was up to Sam, Quorra, and Tron to get to Purgos safely.

 


End file.
